Christine Kong

When I first arrived at Penn, the one thing that I was sure of was that I wanted to continue research at Penn and take advantage of all the resources that CURF and Penn offer. After reaching out to several PIs, I found myself in the Ganetzky Lab, part of the Mitochondrial Medicine department at CHOP. As a lab we are interested in inherited mitochondrial respiratory chain disease, with a goal of applying biochemical approaches to improve diagnostic modalities for mitochondrial disease. Over the past two years, I have been working on developing a quantitative mitochondrial protein assay to detect translation defects. I am also involved in a clinical mitochondrial disease project, in which I am identifying various signatures of ECHS1 deficiency. If you are ever feeling overwhelmed over what kind of research to pursue or on how to contact PIs, or even if you just want to chat about my research, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

• Best Poster at the Stanford Undergraduate Research Conference (2023)
• Ruth Marcus Kanter College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant (2023)
• Endowed Dean's Research Award (2022)
• Ernest M. Brown, Jr. College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant (2021)
• Undergraduate Research Assistant to Dr. Rebecca Ganetzky in Mitochondrial Medicine (Division of Human Genetics) at CHOP (2021 - present)
• Undergraduate Research Assistant in the Garcia Center for Materials Science Research at Stony Brook University (2020)
• Poster presentations at the UMDF Mitochondrial Medicine Symposium (2023), CURF Fall Research Expo (2022), American Chemical Society Spring National Conference (2020), and the International Energy and Sustainability Conference (2020)