Mitzi Kuroda

Mitzi Kuroda is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She was an HHMI Investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital from 1993 to 2007. She has identified many genes and enzymes involved in epigenetic regulation in the fruit fly. In addition, her research has shown the importance of epigenetics in cancer. Her laboratory has identified chromatin remodeling signals and processes that predispose cells to be transformed into cancer cells.

Early life and education Mitzi Kuroda was born in 1958 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she attended elementary and junior high schools. She spent a year in Tokyo before returning to attend Fayetteville High School where she graduated as valedictorian in 1977.

Mitzi Kuroda said, "When I learned about recombinant DNA in college, it captured my imagination. I had to toss aside all my plans to 'save the world' because the ability to make specific DNA molecules for molecular genetic experiments was just too enticing."

Academic research career After postdoctoral work at Stanford, Kuroda became a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine. She has developed an important technique in which epigenetic regulators and their targets are cross-linked, then analyzed via mass spectrometry. In 2017, her laboratory discovered a master regulatory complex for Drosophila development.

Recently, she has begun studies of regulation in cancer cells. Kuroda's laboratory has shown that BRD4-NUT regulator leads to cancer via causing histone modification changes that produce a cascade of remodeling in which domains are opened to allow inappropriate expression of genes by transcription of their RNA.

Honors and awards 1992 Searle Scholar

2013 National Academy of Sciences

Selected works