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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Sun Hur

Sun Hur

2015 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Location

Cambridge, MA

Title

Associate professor, Harvard Medical School

Area(s) of Research

Inflammatory and autoimmune diseases; experimental enzymology

Education

University of California, San Francisco (postdoc); University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD & BS, physics); Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (research); Seoul’s Ehwa Womans University (BS, physics)

Country of Birth

South Korea

Tags
autoimmune autoimmune diseases biomedical science enzymes enzymology south korea
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Sun Hur, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, works to uncover how the immune system distinguishes self from non-self, bearing implications for the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

Hur’s foray into science began at home in Seoul, South Korea: Her father, an electronics engineer, was a guiding influence in her childhood, emphasizing problem-solving over passive learning. Her mother forsook a career as a chemist to help provide a nurturing home for her children. From a young age, Hur was intrigued by order and chaos.

Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics at Seoul’s Ehwa Womans University, she became enchanted with biological systems. She then moved to the United States in 2000 for an undergraduate summer research program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and an exchange program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sun Hur stands on the floor of a laboratory surrounded by lab apparatus and equipment.

Before long, Hur enrolled in a PhD program and then launched her own lab as a 29-year-old assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in 2008. She explored how the innate immune system of animals recognizes invaders, in particular disease-causing viruses that generate a double-stranded RNA during replication.

Further studies focused on genetic mutations in a protein called MDA5, which can lead to a rare inflammatory disorder called Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome, whose symptoms include intellectual disability. “We’re following up on this work by asking if there are specific [cellular] RNA molecules that stimulate the MDA5 signaling,” she adds. Pursuing the therapeutic implications of that possibility, Hur has teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to find drugs that can suppress aberrant signaling by MDA5.

The clinical impact of Hur’s work may extend beyond inflammatory disorders: She is now exploring ways to use genetic engineering to target gene fusion events that underlie some cancers.

 

Awards and Accomplishments

  • New Investigator Award, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center
Tags
autoimmune autoimmune diseases biomedical science enzymes enzymology south korea

Jury Members

2015 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Iannis Aifantis

Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology, New York University School of Medicine

Heran Darwin

Professor of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine

Laurie Dempsey

Senior Editor, Nature Immunology

Yibin Kang

Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University

Peter Palese

Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair of Microbiology, Professor of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Leslie Vosshall

Robin Chemers Neustein Professor, The Rockefeller University
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Related Prize Recipients

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