Rate My Professor Kimberly Reynolds

Kimberly Reynolds, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics and the Department of Biophysics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. She chairs the Graduate Track in Computational Biology. Reynolds earned her B.A. in Biochemistry from Rice University in 2001 and her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006, focusing on physics-based computational protein design to engineer protein-protein interfaces under Dr. Tracy Handel. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at The Scripps Research Institute from 2007 to 2008 and at UT Southwestern's Green Center for Systems Biology from 2008 to 2014 with Dr. Rama Ranganathan, demonstrating that conserved protein surface sites function as allosteric hotspots. Reynolds joined the UT Southwestern faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2014, establishing the Reynolds Lab, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2023.

The Reynolds Lab employs statistical analysis, comparative genomics, and high-throughput epistasis experiments to explore the architecture and evolution of cellular systems, with emphasis on central metabolism and structures like the bacterial flagellum. Using Escherichia coli as a model organism, the lab generates mutation libraries to quantify impacts on growth and develops predictive models linking genotype to phenotype. These efforts support antibiotic discovery, metabolic pathway engineering, microbial evolution studies, and frameworks for complex organisms including humans. Key publications include "The genetic landscape of a metabolic interaction" (Nature Communications, 2024), "A continuous epistasis model for predicting growth rate given combinatorial variation in gene expression and environment" (Cell Systems, 2024), "Structurally distributed surface sites tune allosteric regulation" (eLife, 2021), and "Considering metabolic context in enzyme evolution and design" (Biochemistry, 2025). Reynolds has received the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator Award (2014), NSF CAREER Award (2020), UT Southwestern Outstanding Graduate Educator Award (2020), and Biophysical Society Biopolymers-in-Vivo Young Faculty Award (2022). She contributes to graduate education through steering committees, admissions panels, and mentoring on 19 thesis committees.