View of Sherman Fairchild lab with trees in the foreground and a partly cloudy sky in the background
Principal Investigator

Kara McKinley, Ph.D.

Kara McKinley
Image of Kara McKinley, Ph.D.

Kara McKinley, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
  • Principal Faculty member
    Harvard Stem Cell Institute
  • Associate member
    Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
  • Freeman Hrabowski Scholar
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute


Kara McKinley joined HSCRB in 2021. She received her A.B. from Princeton University in 2010 and her Ph.D. from MIT in 2016. From 2016-2021 she was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the founder of Leading Edge, an initiative to promote gender equity among life sciences faculty.

Lab Overview

The McKinley laboratory studies the uterus to advance reproductive health and regenerative medicine. The human uterine lining (endometrium) undergoes dramatic tissue remodeling each month over the menstrual cycle, followed by shedding during menstruation and subsequent repair, ultimately regenerating ~400 times over the reproductive lifespan.

We use high-resolution live microscopy to watch and perturb regeneration in real time, and use a variety of genetic, molecular, and cell biological approaches to mechanistically dissect these processes over single-cell and tissue length scales. Our goals are to define the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the remarkable regenerative capacity of this organ, to understand how defects in these processes give rise to pathologies including cancers, endometriosis, and abnormal uterine bleeding, and to harness their regenerative mechanisms for the precise repair of old or damaged tissues.

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