Kimberly Tsui
Short Biography:
Dr. Kimberly Tsui received her B.S. in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology from UCLA in 2014 and her PhD in Genetics from Stanford University in 2019. She then joined the lab of Andrew Dillin at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow, where she studied how the ER stress response influences cell surface glycosylation. Prior to joining UGA’s Center for Molecular Medicine in Fall 2026, she was an assistant professor at LSU Health Shreveport for a year. Her lab combines functional genomics, glycobiology, and cellular stress biology to understand how glycans regulate cell-cell communication in health and disease.
Research Interest:
Cell-interactions and signaling events are modulated throughout the body by a diverse array of cell surface glycans. While recent advances in chemical tools and techniques have enabled us to modify and characterize this glycome, our understanding of the cellular regulation and recognition of glycans remains limited: How do cells coordinate the synthesis of the tens of thousands of unique glycan structures? How do the mere ~200 human lectins recognize and interpret the massive glycan repertoire? And ultimately, how do these glycan-lectin interactions result in functional cell-cell interactions?
In the Tsui lab, we combine functional genomics and glycomics to answer these questions. We are working to uncover the gene regulatory networks that control glycosylation and map the glycan-binding specificity of the human lectome. By uncovering how glycans are “written” and “read”, we seek to understand how they regulate cell-cell communication in health and disease. In addition, we are interested in studying these glycan-lectin interactions in the context of neuroinflammation, with the goal of discovering novel therapeutic strategies and that selectively target harmful glycan-lectin interactions.