Rate My Professor Kara McKinley

Kara McKinley is an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology in the Medicine faculty at Harvard University, joining the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology in 2021. She earned an A.B. from Princeton University in 2010 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. From 2016 to 2021, she held positions as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and an NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. McKinley is also Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, an Associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She founded Leading Edge, an initiative comprising an annual symposium and fellowship program to promote gender equity among life sciences faculty.

The McKinley laboratory studies regeneration in the uterus and the biology of menstruation, focusing on the endometrium's cyclic remodeling, shedding during menstruation, and scarless repair, which occurs approximately 400 times over a reproductive lifespan. The lab employs high-resolution live microscopy, genetic tools, molecular approaches, and cell biology to dissect these processes across single-cell and tissue scales, aiming to define underlying mechanisms, elucidate defects leading to pathologies such as endometrial cancers, endometriosis, and abnormal uterine bleeding, and harness regenerative principles for tissue repair. McKinley's prior research on centromere identity, kinetochore assembly, and cell-cycle regulation produced influential publications including “The molecular basis for centromere identity and function” (Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 2016), “The CENP-LN complex forms a critical node in an integrated meshwork of interactions at the centromere-kinetochore interface” (Molecular Cell, 2015), “Polo-like kinase 1 licenses CENP-A deposition at centromeres” (Cell, 2014), and more recent works such as “Mechanisms of Regeneration and Fibrosis in the Endometrium” (Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, 2023) and “Emerging frontiers in regenerative medicine” (Science, 2023). Her contributions have earned awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, Harold M. Weintraub Award, Kaluza Prize from the American Society for Cell Biology, Merton Bernfield Memorial Award, Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation, and Dale F. Frey Award from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.