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Jan. 23, 2025

Kim ’11 returns to Princeton this spring as an incoming assistant professor with a dual appointment in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute. Her research focuses on engineering new molecular tools to replicate the therapeutic benefits of certain drugs, such as psychedelics to relieve anxiety, while minimizing unwanted effects like hallucinations.

Christina Kim, Ph.D., didn’t set out to be a scientist.

“If you look at my undergrad transcripts, you’ll see that it’s completely filled with music classes,” said Kim, who returns to Princeton this spring as an incoming assistant professor of neuroscience and bioengineering. “I grew up playing the cello, and I really loved making music and the creativity of it. You can make it sound whatever way you want just by tweaking some minor things.”

An influential course, though, taught by neuroscience professor Michael Graziano, Ph.D., took Kim’s joy of making new things with small tweaks from the orchestra pit to the lab bench.

“Just listening to him lecture made me think, ‘Oh, neuroscience is such an interesting topic, with so many unknown questions!’,” Kim said. “And the experiments he described had this bent of creativity that really attracted me to the field.”

That initial attraction to science as a student has come full circle now as Kim rejoins the Princeton community this spring as an assistant professor. Her dual appointment starting in January 2025 with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute (ODBI) reflects the intersection of Kim’s research on building new molecular tools to better understand the brain.

“The training and environment I had as an undergrad really got me hooked on wanting to become a neuroscience researcher,” Kim said. “It set the tone for the type of research I wanted to pursue at the interface of technology development and application, and discovery of brain circuit mechanisms.”

It was a “no brainer”, Kim said, when PNI and ODBI announced the search for a professor to build a bridge between the two institutes.

“I just thought, ‘Wow! There could be no better fit for the kind of work I want to do,’” Kim said.

Kim’s lab is focused on two main topics: protein engineering and systems neuroscience. Her team’s engineering work helps design new tools to better probe the brain, such as those that allow Kim and others to tag neurons so they can either profile them (e.g. what protein gets made there; what type of neuron is it) or allow her to affix a molecular, light-sensitive switch onto cells to allow precise on/off control of specific neural circuits.

As a neuroscientist, Kim is interested in using these tools to develop more targeted and effective therapeutics for neuropsychiatric disorders, such as addiction and anxiety.

Her lab’s recent paper in the journal Science last fall captures this marriage of applied engineering.

“We applied a new type of tool called a light-and-calcium-dependent integrator,” Kim said. “It allows us to shine light into the mouse brain at very specific time windows such as whenever a mouse was injected with the psychedelic drug DOI in our recent study. That tool then allowed us to tag and identify which neurons in the mouse prefrontal cortex were getting strongly modulated by that psychedelic.”

That gave Kim and her team the unprecedented ability to map which cells were being activated by a drug, and to isolate tagged cells to determine which type of neurons they are, which genes and proteins are being expressed, among other molecular demographic details.

It also allowed Kim and her team to just use light to turn on tagged neurons, giving mice the same brain stimulation as would be triggered by the psychedelic drug.

“Once the psychedelic drug’s effects had worn off, we could reactivate those cells using optogenetics and found that it mimics some of the drug’s beneficial effects like reduced anxiety,” Kim said. “Importantly, it doesn’t seem to recapitulate the hallucinogenic-like behaviors when you give them a psychedelic.”

Before launching her own research lab, Kim first completed her senior thesis under the tutelage of PNI’s co-founder and the Henry L. Hillman professor of neuroscience David Tank, Ph.D., and received her bachelor’s degree in molecular biology with a certificate in quantitative and computational neuroscience.

Kim then went on to earn her doctoral degree from Stanford University in 2017 in the lab of Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., whose lab famously played a central role in the development of optogenetics. After receiving her doctorate, Kim stayed at Stanford and completed her postdoctoral training in the lab of Alice Ting, Ph.D.

The Kim lab launched in 2021 at the University of California, Davis, where Kim was an assistant professor at the Center for Neuroscience and the department of neurology.

For her trailblazing work as an early career researcher, Kim has received numerous awards and recognition, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interfaces (2019), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2023), and an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2023).