Rate My Professor Kay Chung

Kay Chung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. She earned a B.S. in Pharmacy from Seoul National University in 2011, a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University in 2018, and completed postdoctoral training as a scholar at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2023. Her research focuses on synthetic biology approaches to engineer T cell states for enhanced anti-tumor immunity, including transcription factor-based programming, drug-inducible circuits, signal rewiring platforms, and oncolytic virus strategies for context-specific immune modulation.

Chung previously conducted doctoral work in protein engineering at Stanford and postdoctoral research on T cell differentiation at the Salk Institute as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined UNC Chapel Hill as Assistant Professor following her postdoctoral training. Her honors include the 2023 NIH K01 Research Scientist Development Award, the 2020 Keystone Symposia Future of Science Fund Scholarship, the 2019 HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Finalist designation, the 2019 Damon Runyon Fellowship Award, and the 2019 Salk Women & Science Special Award. A key publication is the 2026 paper “Atlas-guided discovery of transcription factors for T cell programming” in Nature. She leads the Chung Lab in developing clinically applicable synthetic biology tools to harness the immune system against cancer.