Posted on August 27, 2026 in ASRC News, Neuroscience Initiative
Please join us in welcoming Professor J. Wren Kim to the Neuroscience Initiative and the ASRC community! Wren is joining us as a tenure track assistant professor in biology (Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology) at the CUNY Graduate Center, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have him!
Wren comes to us from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Nicholas Ingolia’s lab. There, he built a clever new tool named “Cal-ID” that allows users to tag proteins at the moment and place where a calcium signal fires inside a cell — work that was published and highlighted in Nature Chemical Biology. He followed that up with a related method called CalTRAP, which links calcium signals directly to the machinery that builds new proteins. In plain terms: Wren has found a way to catch cells “in the act” of responding to calcium, one of the most important signals for keeping neurons healthy, and to see what that response actually builds.
Before Berkeley, Wren earned his stripes as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, working in Professors Ted and Valina Dawson’s lab from 2010 to 2017. His research there focused on how a genetic mutation linked to familial Parkinson’s disease throws off protein production in dopamine neurons, using both stem-cell models and mice. That work — published as first author in Cell Stem Cell and eNeuro, and as a contributing author in Cell — helped connect the dots between calcium regulation and neuronal vulnerability, setting him on the path to the calcium-signaling research he’s known for today.
Along the way, Wren’s talent has been recognized with a string of honors: doctoral fellowships from the Korean Foundation of Advanced Studies, the David Israel Macht Young Investigator Award at Johns Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellowship from the FRAXA Fragile X Research Foundation, and most recently a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.
We’re excited to see the interdisciplinary connections he’ll bring to our community as he builds his own research program here.