Julie Na Yoon Kim (CHME ’21) was recognized by NU’s College of Engineering for having shown great promise and intellectual fortitude throughout her co-op experiences. Julie enrolled at Northeastern as an aspiring pharmacist in the six-year Doctor of Pharmacy program, but her first research experience, in lab of Professor Ban An Khaw, led her to change her major and her career goals. Seeing for the first time the importance of not only developing effective drug therapies, but also of ensuring accurate and targeted delivery mechanisms for those drugs, Julie realized that she wanted to pursue translational drug delivery research. In Professor Khaw’s lab, Julie mainly worked on prodrug-antibody conjugates that perform targeted drug delivery for breast cancer chemotherapies. After completing this project, she worked on antibacterial nanoparticles in Professor Thomas Webster’s nanomedicine lab, earning a PEAK Experiences Summit Award to support the project. In 2019, Julie joined CaNCURE to investigate nanoparticle-mediated delivery of tumor suppressor mRNA. Her most recent co-op was at the Langer Lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, focusing on nanoparticle-mediated immunotherapy. Julie is currently pursuing an MD/PhD, with the goal of becoming a a physician-scientist who can improve current chemotherapies through drug delivery technology.
Na Yoon was also nominated for the 2020 Barry Goldwater Scholarship.
