Shin Receives Prestigious NCI Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Transition Award

The National Institutes of Health has granted Woojung Shin, a graduate student working with Hyun Jung Kim, a National Cancer Institute Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award (F99/K00).

The award will fund her project titled: Deciphering the Role of the Gut Microbiome in Colitis-Associated Colorectal Cancer Using a Patient-Specific Disease-on-a-Chip. Shin will receive up to two years of support for her predoctoral study and four years of funding for postdoctoral research, ensuring a smooth transition in her academic career pursuits.

Shin is the second recipient at UT Austin to receive this prestigious award and the first ever in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Shin’s research currently focuses on disease modeling using microfluidics gut-on-a-chip models. She is particularly focusing on patient-specific inflammation models, such as inflammatory bowel disease, colitis, and Crohn’s disease, using patient-derived samples. Read more about her research using gut-on-a-chip models to test probiotic therapies on colitis and on the gut microbiome’s effect on cancer immunotherapy.