Research/Areas of Interest
Immunoengineering, Genetic Engineering, Adoptive Cell Therapy, Immuno-Oncology, Transplant Immunology
Education
- BS, Cornell University, Ithaca, United States
- PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States
Biography
Dr. Karen Martin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research integrates principals of immunology, genetic engineering, and translational medicine to advance natural killer (NK) cell therapies for the treatment of solid tumors. Dr. Martin earned her B.S. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the lab of Dr. Andrés García, she developed synthetic biomaterial delivery vehicles for cell therapy applications in regenerative medicine, with an emphasis on understanding how immune responses affect the success or failure of these therapies. She then completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Karl-Johan Malmberg at Oslo University Hospital in Norway, where she developed genetic engineering strategies to mitigate immune rejection of allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cell therapies. The Martin Lab, opening in January 2026, will focus on the development of genetic engineering strategies to enhance NK cell persistence, tumor homing and infiltration, and therapeutic efficacy against solid tumors, immune-evasion strategies to mitigate rejection of allogeneic cell therapies, and high-throughput screening platforms to rapidly assess large libraries of genetic modifications in immune cells.