Lilian Kabeche, PhD

Lilian Kabeche, Ph.D., joined the Yale faculty in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and a member of the Cancer Biology Institute. Dr. Kabeche attended the University of Miami, where she majored in Microbiology and Immunology (B.S. 2007). She did her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Dartmouth College in Dr. Duane Compton’s lab, where she studied how healthy cells ensure that chromosomes are correctly segregated during cell division (mitosis). She went on to do her post-doctoral work in Dr. Lee Zou’s lab at Mass General Hospital, Harvard University, where she identified a novel role for the DNA damage repair kinase, ATR, in mitosis. Her lab's current work uses single-cell techniques to define how the DNA damage pathway pathway promotes genome stability throughout the cell cycle.

Thus far, her lab has elucidated that members of the DNA damage response pathway function in mitosis to ensure that chromosomes are correctly segregated, interact with the immune system, and promote cell-autonomous and non-autonomous mechanisms to eliminate damaged cytosolic DNA and regulate genome integrity through epigenetic regulation of the centromere. These works shift the current paradigm that components of the DNA damage response pathway have a singular function- to recognize and repair DNA. Dr. Kabeche aims to leverage her lab's discoveries to devise better therapeutic strategies for cancer treatment using DNA damage response kinase inhibitors.