Student Profiles

In high school, Mitchell Sun attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy where he was introduced to research in the laboratory of Dr. Yulia Komarova in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Under Dr. Komarova, he studied how the role of the microtubule cytoskeleton in lung vascular permeability can provide therapeutic targets in treating inflammatory lung diseases. After graduating high school, he went on to study a B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago in their guaranteed medicine program (GPPA), which allowed him the safety to pursue more of his interests adjacent to medicine. He continued research in Dr. Komarova’s laboratory where he expanded his project to studying the hypoxic mechanism of vascular permeability in pulmonary arterial hypertension and worked on developing a method of studying the protein interactome through a microsystem platform to pull down protein complexes.

Through the Summer Internship Program at the National institutes of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, he pursued a diverse array of research with Dr. Zhengping Zhuang during his college summers which included characterizing a novel hypoxia inducible factor mutant mouse model, developing a chimeric antigen receptor t-cell (CAR-T) targeting glioblastoma models, examining the role of fatty acid oxidation in macrophage phenotype and its impact on cancer migration in hepatocellular carcinoma, and developing a compound to downregulate chronic activation of the hypoxia pathway in disease states.

His experience with translational research pushed him to pursue an MD/PhD at Baylor College of Medicine. During his PhD, he aims to further develop an immunotherapeutic cancer vaccine in Dr. Zhengping Zhuang’s lab at the NCI and to investigate its immunological mechanisms with Professor Michael Dustin and Professor Charlotte Deane at the University of Oxford.