Researchers in Medicine

The Department of Medicine is at the forefront of groundbreaking research endeavors in occupational and environmental medicine, cardiovascular science, epidemiology, clinical trials, implementation science, and healthcare delivery innovations aimed at addressing health disparities. The department's growing biomedical research team in Grand Rapids works with colleagues across various disciplines within MSU and its community partners. 

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Researchers

• Jeffrey Klomp, PhD

  Assistant Professor of Medicine

  The first PhD to graduate from the Van Andel Research Institute Graduate School, Dr. Klomp conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago. His work has encompassed a large breadth of transcriptomic and genomic studies of cancer, developmental, and vascular biology, focusing on the integration of ‘omic data sets to drive functional experiments in the laboratory. His recent research redefined the transcriptome driven by oncogenic KRAS and offers new insight into how KRAS controls cell proliferation in cancer.

• Jenny Klomp, PhD

  Assistant Professor of Medicine

  Dr. Klomp completed her PhD at the University of Illinois Chicago where she developed tools to study the Src proto-oncogene. Her subsequent work has focused on understanding the role of aberrant kinase activity in KRAS mutant cancers and how to exploit this therapeutically. She is currently identifying how ERK kinase supports pancreatic cancer cell growth using a combination of transcriptomics, phosphoproteomics, engineered kinases, and functional genetic screens. Dr. Klomp has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the NCI (F32 and K99/R00) and American Cancer Society.

• Allison Kuipers, PhD

  Associate Professor of Medicine

  Dr. Kuipers received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh where she was an NHLBI-funded post-doctoral fellow and built her translational research program. Dr. Kuipers’ primary research is on the molecular determinants of vascular, cardiac and other chronic diseases. Her overarching research interests stem from previous exposure to both laboratory and epidemiologic research and include the development of translational approaches that move from “the bench to the population”. Dr. Kuipers’ current research is focused on evaluating the epidemiologic predictors of cardiac structure and function, and other subclinical cardiovascular disease measures in a population-based, longitudinal cohort study on the Caribbean island of Tobago. This represents the first population-based data on cardiac structure and function in African Caribbeans to date and will help establish the risk factors and molecular predictors of these measures in this population subset with a great burden of hypertensive disease. Her overarching aim is to use a variety of banked biospecimen samples to test the association of molecular markers, such as genetic variation, gene expression, and protein concentration, with cardiac and vascular measures in order to better understand the etiology and physiology of cardiovascular disease. At MSU, her long-term research goals are focused on harnessing translational molecular techniques to study cardiac and vascular disease in clinical and population-based settings to identify novel disease mechanisms with an eye toward implementation to impact and improve human health.
  
  Dr. Kuiper's office is located in the Doug Meijer Medical Innovation Building.