ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Michael H. Kramer, MD, PhD seeks to pursue a physician-scientist career, treating patients with hematologic malignancies and running a research lab combining cutting-edge computational analysis with high-throughput techniques and mechanistic studies in model systems to understand leukemia biology and develop personalized therapeutics for patients. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was drawn by a fascination with semiconductors and computers to study Electrical and Computer Engineering. While he spent six months working at Intel on design of the world’s most advanced microchips, however, he sensed that advances in computer hardware were becoming incremental and saw instead the potential for vast gains in human well-being during his lifetime through scientific advances in medicine. Dr. Kramer therefore switched gears, completed pre-medical requirements and joined the MD/PhD (MSTP) program at the University of California San Diego. During his PhD with Dr. Trey Ideker, they developed a new type of whole-cell model – the data-driven gene ontology – which can be used to analyze a wide range of high‑throughput 'omic data sets to discover new biology while also operating as a whole-cell predictive model. After graduating the MD/PhD program in 2018, he completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and entered Hematology / Oncology Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. Now in the research-phase of fellowship since July 2021, Dr. Kramer has been acquiring disease-specific knowledge and wet-lab expertise in the study of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) under the expert guidance of Dr. Timothy Ley, which led to publishing a first author study in Blood on the proteomic and phosphoproteomic landscapes of AML. Currently studying the mechanisms of synergy of the common-leukemia initiating mutations in DNMT3A and NPM1 in the final year of fellowship, he is excited to utilize expertise from each of these experiences during a career as a physician-scientist both treating and studying hematologic malignancies.