Youngmee Kim
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Women’s Health Research Associate
About
Dr. Young-Mee Kim is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a BIRCWH associate.
Dr. Kim’s research focuses on vascular biology and vascular heterogeneity in both healthy and diseased states. She has expertise in redox biology, real-time imaging, transcriptomic analysis, and proteomic analysis. She is the first and co-corresponding author of a 2025 Nature Cancer paper titled “Impaired barrier integrity of the skeletal muscle vascular endothelium drives progression of cancer cachexia.”
Dr. Kim is expanding her cancer research to examine how vascular endothelial health affects the progression of cancer cachexia in peri- and postmenopausal women. She has also developed new projects exploring the roles of vascular endothelial cells in the progression of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), focusing on whether MASLD progression differs by sex.
By identifying the transcriptional co-activator PGC1α as a key regulator of endothelial health, she believes she can discover a novel route to reverse or prevent cancer cachexia and MASLD in a menopausal status- or sex-dependent manner.