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.