Spotlight: Kimberly J. McCabe

Kimberly is a Senior research scientist at Simula and coordinates SUURPh, a collaborative PhD program between Simula, the University of Oslo (UiO), and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

What is your educational background and how did you become interested in your field?

I studied at Yale University for my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering. In my junior year, my father died unexpectedly from a heart attack, and I decided I would dedicate my time to understanding heart failure and contributing insights that might lead to better treatments and detection. I joined the lab of Professor Stuart Campbell and began studying computational cardiac mechanics. For my Master’s and PhD, I went to the University of California San Diego to work with Professor Andrew McCulloch in a similar field, computationally exploring mechanisms of a potential treatment for heart failure called dATP. In the context of heart failure, dATP (deoxyadenosine triphosphate) can improve the heart muscle’s ability to contract. 

What are your current research projects or areas of focus in your field?

We know that understanding how cells communicate is essential for uncovering the mechanisms that drive life. I am currently interested in the effects of cellular membrane receptors on the way calcium ions move through heart and brain cells. How do receptors organize to optimize the movement of ions in our cells? How can the shape of the membrane affect cellular communication? In disease, how does this system break down? Communication within and between cells is mediated by the movement of ions, so understanding the way that receptors are organized and interact with each other can give us great insight into the mechanisms of disease. 

What do you want to achieve with your research?

I am interested in understanding heart function in health and disease at the molecular level. By better understanding how the cell functions, we can identify potential treatments or drug candidates. As an example, much of my PhD work involved understanding how a potential treatment for heart failure called dATP works within the cell to increase the force produced by the heart. I also investigated additional drug effects by exploring dATP’s interaction with an important calcium pump. 

What do you see as the biggest challenges or unsolved problems in your field today?

Truly understanding heart disease requires a multi-scale approach. Many heart problems begin at the molecular level, but diagnosis often occurs at the organ level. Therefore, we must consider both very short and long time and length scales to fully understand the problem. When creating computational models, we often make assumptions to simplify physiological problems and make them more tractable for computations to be performed in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, we must decide which assumptions to make in order to make the simulations as realistic as possible, as we simultaneously prepare for a future with greater computational power and, thus, more detailed simulations. 

Can you share an example of how you collaborate with industry partners or other researchers in your work? 

I work very closely with Professor Padmini Rangamani at UCSD, and we co-mentor a PhD student through the Simula- UiO- UCSD PhD Training Programme (SUURPh). This relationship has been very fruitful, as we can leverage our complementary backgrounds to solve problems in cardiac health and neuroscience. The SUURPh programme is a great example of international collaboration. The programme funds 8 PhD students in computational physiology who are co-mentored at Simula, UiO, and UCSD and also includes a yearly summer school which brings together graduate students from all over the world. 

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Thanks to Kimberly for contributing to this researcher profile.

At Simula, we are proud of our team of more than 150 scientific researchers, working together to create a collaborative and innovative environment for scientific research.