The John M. Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation

Catherine Whitney Kaiser is the winner of the John M. Houchens Prize, which honors a former registrar of the university and is awarded to the doctoral student who presents the most meritorious dissertation for the current commencement.

Catherine is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where she trained in the laboratory of Dr. Melissa Smith. She earned her bachelor’s degree in General Chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 2019, completing the program in three years and taking organic chemistry during her first undergraduate summer. The following summer, she began biochemical research at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and was later invited to present this work to a freshman biology course. During her time at Penn State, she conducted independent research in both inorganic and physical chemistry while maintaining part-time employment, presenting her findings at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Atlanta, Georgia. After graduation, she worked as a production chemist in Alaska, where she improved laboratory safety protocols, streamlined workflows, and developed an in-house product that reduced costs by more than ninety percent.

During her doctoral training, Catherine’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and focused on characterizing the integration patterns of gene therapy vectors and assessing whether therapeutic constructs were delivered intact. She contributed to multiple collaborative studies and presented her work at national conferences, including the Cell Symposia conference on Gene and Cell Based Therapies and the Keystone Symposia conference on Emerging Cell Therapies. Her research presentations have received multiple recognitions, including awards at the Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Departmental Retreat and the Kentucky IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence Conference. Catherine's work is shedding light on these unknowns, particularly in the cell's defenses with respect to lentiviral infection, that all converge on suppressing CAR expression. These insights can now be leveraged to engineer more stable CAR expressing T cells for enhanced clinical benefit. This truly highlights the impact of her dissertation, which is the underlying focus of the Houchens prize. Her experimental work has resulted in 4 publications, two as first-author, including one currently under review in Molecular Therapy (IF:12.1), which is a premier journal in the gene therapy field.

In addition to her research, Catherine demonstrated strong leadership as both President and Vice President of a student-led science policy and outreach organization at the University of Louisville. In this role, she secured grant funding to support a program that brought graduate students to the Kentucky State Capitol, connecting trainees with state lawmakers and providing direct exposure to the policy-making process.

As she completes her doctoral training, Catherine is finalizing a first-author manuscript investigating the structural integrity of lentiviral vectors used in clinically applied gene therapies, identifying structural variations that may impact therapeutic performance and highlighting opportunities to improve vector production and quality control. Following graduation, she plans to pursue a career in the biotechnology industry, applying her expertise in genomics, sequencing technologies, and gene therapy to develop innovative therapeutics that improve patient outcomes.