Daniel Kim

Tell us a bit about yourself and your life.

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but mostly grew up around the Boston area, in Lexington. My parents were from South Korea. They immigrated here to pursue graduate degrees. I have a brother, and a sister and two nieces who live in Seattle.

I’m currently an MD/PhD student at the Harvard-MIT MD/PhD program—a sixth year student overall. For the PhD, I am in the medical engineering and medical physics program at MIT. I’m also a second-year Emerson Harris program fellow at MIT, studying piano with Mi-Eun Kim. I’m a resident tutor in Adams House at Harvard, where I also help out in the arts and community endeavors.

Before going to college, my dream was to become a musician, a classical pianist. So I studied pretty seriously and went to New England Conservatory Preparatory School, which is a version of the conservatory for pre-college students. Did the competitions and the concerts and all that stuff. But due to a couple of factors, I decided not to go into music as a career. The summer before senior year I was doing three or four competitions and I was really stressed out. I developed some ulcers and I was like, OK, this is probably not the most sustainable career for me, getting stress ulcers at 16 or 17, which was tough because I really loved music.

Through college I played a lot of music and I didn’t just do classical piano. I went into sound production for friends who were in the theater world. I played in some pit orchestras, explored other genres of music, and now I am coming back to classical music because this program is really cool. It tapped me into the MIT music community.

I am approaching the end of the PhD part of my training, and I’ll return then for two years of medical school to complete most of my rotations. My plan is to also apply for a physician-scientist training program.

How did you find your way to scientific research?

I was really interested in a lot of different subjects in high school and in the early days of college. But I guess the most maybe significant experience was that I spent my freshman year summer in the Fernando Camargo lab at the Boston Children’s Hospital. The lab studies hematopoiesis but also models solid tumors, and I really loved learning about that field. In the early days of training, mentorship is the most important thing. Michael Dill, who was a postdoc in the laboratory and is now a professor at Heidelberg University, was my mentor. He showed me the excitement of science and how it’s an art, in a way. I think he really helped me find those two sides. I was like, oh, this is great. I guess I’ll go into that.

What does the Emerson Harris Fellowship entail?

It’s actually quite involved, and it has made me better as a musician, which is really nice. It involves private studies, lessons every week. You also have a weekly seminar with other fellows, two hours on Mondays. People basically perform. There are instructors also there and, together, we critique the performance. It culminates, at the end of the academic year, with an hour-long solo recital. In addition, there’s a lot of opportunities such as playing in masterclasses. I got tapped to play at some MIT based events … playing for student composers, performances and all that stuff.

Who’s your favorite composer?

It really depends on the mood, I think. I think, in general, I gravitate towards the heavy Russian hitters. So like Rachmaninoff and Scriabin and Prokofiev. They try to stare into the sun. That’s what they try to do with their music, and they encompass a lot of human emotion too.

Back to the science, what are you working on now?

I’m aiming to develop non-invasive diagnostics for early detection and monitoring of diseases, currently focusing on cancer and infectious disease. I approach this goal with two main focuses. One is developing breath biopsy tests to leverage volatile molecular signatures in breath for detection of disease. And the second is advancing blood biopsy tests. For breath, we’re designing novel nanoparticle sensors that release synthetic volatile molecules instead of the ones you sort of produce in your own breath. So you would take them in and, upon interacting with disease associated proteases, they would release those volatiles, and then you can collect and detect them to monitor disease.

And then for blood, we’re using different nanoparticles, such as liposomes, to transiently delay clearance of specific analytes in blood like extracellular vesicles and cell-free RNA. Nanoscale analytes are cleared mainly through the reticular endothelial system organs such as the liver, the spleen and vasculature. Usually, this is very good. You don’t want unnecessary debris to build up in our circulation. But it can take away some informative analytes. So we’re envisioning a way to transiently stop clearance that is not detrimental in the long run. That’s where these nanoparticles come into play, what we call priming agents. Our lab and others published a seminal paper last year showing that administering these nanoparticle priming agents can slow clearance of key cellular agents in those organs—so for this window of time, you’re getting buildup of the analytes. In that window, if you sample the blood, you can extract more information from the same amount of liquid biopsy.

What interests you most about this work?

I think for me, the most fascinating thing is that in early detection there are two main questions: what do we want to detect and how do we want to sense what we want to detect? The first question relies on deep understanding of biology. It’s very important for clinical relevance. The latter, the “how do we sense?”, is much more about advancing technology, which is principally driven by studies in physical sciences and engineering. Here we’re thinking about both at the same time, we can find ourselves innovating on the technology that we use to detect certain biology, and other times we are discovering more in the biology that enables us or shows us a new use case for new technology. And so for someone with a pretty broad but disparate training, it’s really rewarding to be in such an interdisciplinary space where I can see things connect, and my life feels coherent.

Do you have a favorite book?

Depends on the mood. I actually try to read quite a bit. And mainly I try to read fiction because I read a lot of nonfiction in my work and I enjoy trying to switch it up. So I’m enjoying this book called The Hours right now by Michael Cunningham. It’s sort of this retelling of Virginia Woolf and her character. But I think the most impactful book that I’ve really read in the past year was this book called Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. It’s this book about a young poet who’s going through a lot of tough situations and finds a way to reconcile their past and kind of find meaning in life. The reason I like it so much is because it’s more common and straightforward to write a book where despair is the point.

Any hobbies?

I would just say I enjoy running. I used to hate running. Maybe it’s like Stockholm syndrome. But I really like running and Boston’s such a beautiful running city to run in, and it’s very safe. And I really like cooking as well. Recently, I’ve also more often tapped back and connected with my mom to learn her recipes, which she learned from her mother and her sisters and brothers back in Korea.

What global issue concerns you the most?

It seems like there’s new ones every day [laugh]. But I think, in general, one that maybe might encompass a lot of them is the spread of misinformation on social media and news outlets, particularly when aided by generative AI. And the reason why I think it concerns me the most is because it basically touches on a lot of different global issues and it actually affects people’s actions in those issues.

How important has mentorship been to you?

I’ve been told good mentorship is the most critical thing for success and mentorship, I think, comes in many different forms. It comes in the scientific form, but it also comes in the cheerleading form. It comes in the “what’s possible” kind of inspiring form. And it comes in the “dealing with hardship” form. Great mentors encompass all or many of those roles. Peers can be great mentors too. I’ve found that people are wiser in other things than I am. I’ve been taught a lot, in a way, by the students I advise.