about
I am Karen Shih, a PhD candidate in Biology at Stanford University, co-advised by Dmitri Petrov and Monte Winslow.
I study cancer evolution, with a focus on how the cellular stress associated with high mutational burden shapes tumor fitness and creates potential therapeutic vulnerabilities. My PhD research combines human cancer genomics and transcriptomics with tumor barcoding, CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing, deep sequencing, and mouse models to investigate how highly mutated tumors tolerate protein misfolding stress, which co-occurring mutations alter their fitness, and whether the resulting dependencies can be exploited therapeutically.
I am interested in extending this work toward computational and AI-based approaches for cancer therapeutics, treatment resistance, and tumor evolution. In particular, I want to integrate genomic and experimental data to understand how tumors adapt under therapeutic pressure, predict routes to resistance, and identify interventions that could prevent or delay resistance.
Before Stanford, I earned my B.A. in Molecular & Cell Biology with honors from UC Berkeley, where I worked in Michael Rape’s lab with Andrew Manford on the ubiquitin–proteasome system and cellular stress responses.