Dr Kate Markey
Dr Kate Markey
Physician-Scientist (Haematology)
Graduated from Master of Clinical Research Methods (2018)
The knowledge I gained really helped give me the skills and confidence I needed to increase my involvement in clinical projects, and to contribute to the design of large multicentre trials.
Assistant Professor Kate Markey undertook a Master of Clinical Research (formerly Master of Clinical Research Methods) with us from her then home of Brisbane, graduating in 2018. A physician-scientist specialising in Haematology, learnings from the course have helped propel her career to the stage where she runs her own research group at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington.
“When I started the degree I was working in wet-lab immunology research, exploring detailed mechanisms underlying graft-versus-host disease and other complications of bone marrow transplantation. I really wanted to gain new skills to support my research program at the time and into the future.
“Around the time I completed, I changed research direction and started working on large clinical projects, using clinical data, computational methods, and advanced statistics to understand the correlative relationships between the intestinal microbiome and transplantation outcome.
“The coursework that I undertook in the Masters course was immensely helpful in formalizing my training in clinical research, and was very useful as I started to link my mechanistic immunology interests with clinical research.”
While completing the final courses of the program, Dr Markey took up an opportunity with the renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, relocating to the USA in order to do so. The opportunities provided by the move were unparalleled; she extended her research skills even further, and had the chance to work on projects very different from those she’d worked on in Brisbane.
In 2021, she moved to her current role at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, where she runs her own research group. Her lab works with both pre-clinical mechanistic mouse models and clinical samples, and seeks to understand the relationships between the microbiome, the metabolites it produces, and outcomes of cancer therapy, particularly for patients undergoing bone marrow transplantation and immunotherapy for haematological malignancies.
Linking preclinical mechanistic work with clinical data is central to her work there. “By using big clinical data sets to generate hypotheses, I hope that we can gain meaningful insights into the mechanisms by which the intestinal microbiome influences human health.
“Despite advances in the field, a large proportion of my patients still suffer from poor outcomes. I’m inspired by undertaking research that could lead to improvements in patient outcomes, and targeting the microbiome represents an exciting novel area.”
Reflecting back on her Masters learnings, she says, “The knowledge I gained really helped give me the skills and confidence I needed to increase my involvement in clinical projects, and to contribute to the design of large multicentre trials.”