Resident
University of Texas Medical Branch
Disclosure: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Karen M. Ong, MD, PhD is a third-year resident in the combined Internal Medicine/Preventive and Aerospace Medicine Program at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas. She completed a BS in Chemistry (emphasis Biochemistry) at Pacific Union College (2006), researched mathematical models of steroid biochemistry as a pre-doctoral fellow at National Institutes of Health (2006-2008), and trained as a physician-scientist at New York University (2009-2018), graduating with a PhD in Computational Biology (2016) and MD (2018). For her doctoral thesis, she created a mathematical model of in-hospital spread of Klebsiella pneumoniae. Besides computational epidemiology, she is interested in mathematical models of human physiology, particularly those relevant to medicine and spaceflight. She plans to combine her training in applied mathematics and medicine to act as a translational mathematical biologist, using quantitative tools to answer medical questions and using the lens of medicine to help interpret and apply computational research results to improve patient care and better understand human pathophysiology.