Daniel Kim

About Daniel Kim

The son of Korean immigrants, Daniel moved to California with his parents when he was seven. His grandfather was a farmer, and his father was the first in his family to get a college education. Growing up in Silicon Valley, Daniel admired his father's meticulous approach to his work as a semiconductor engineer.

Daniel entered his undergraduate career at Harvard determined to make a difference in health care. He served as co-president of both Harvard College Red Cross and Team HBV, a group that educates the Asian and Pacific Islander community in Boston about the hepatitis B virus. His early involvement in translational research evaluating novel therapeutics for skin cancer convinced him of the potential of bench-side research in enhancing medicine's impact on patients.

After matriculating into Yale's MD/PhD program, Daniel joined Dr. Akiko Iwasaki's lab and elucidated novel roles of vitamin B12 and folic acid in antagonizing the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), a pathway that can be overstimulated by our diet or the environment in precipitating birth defects. Working closely with Dr. Sewon Kang and Dr. Anna Chien from Johns Hopkins, he further investigated how UV radiation could stimulate this pathway to promote photoaging of the skin. After completing his PhD training, he has re-entered the clinical portion of his MD/PhD program and will be applying to dermatology residency programs.