KC Park Wins Young Investigator Award

Trinity Lecturer in Medicine KC Park has won the Young Investigator Award at the European Society of Cardiology’s ‘Frontiers in Cardiovascular Biology’ meeting.

Dr Park is a postdoctoral research scientist at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics and the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and won first place in the Young Investigator Award session of the conference. Competitors for the award are selected for the outstanding quality of their work and present their own original research to a panel of world-renowned experts. Dr Park gave a presentation on his work, ‘Epigenetic changes in the heart triggered by disrupted propionate handling.’ This outlined how ‘propionate’, a metabolite derived from the diet and produced by the body, can act as powerful signal to adjust heart muscle cell behaviour; specifically, how propionate can act as an ‘epigenetic modifier’ to trigger deleterious changes in cardiac gene expression, and drive heart dysfunction.

Dr Park works in the laboratories of Professor Pawel Swietach and Dr. Thomas Milne; he is funded by the Propionic Acidemia Foundation and a Career Development Award from the Oxford BHF Doctoral Training Programme. Dr Park adds this Young Investigator Award to the Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award received in July 2020 from the American Heart Foundation.

On receiving the Young Investigator Award, Dr Park would like to acknowledge the mentorship and collaborations of Dr Nicolas Crump and Associate Professor Thomas Milne from the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM) and the mentorship and supervision of Dr Alzbeta Hulikova, Associate Professor Nicola Smart and his main supervisor, Professor Pawel Swietach.