Hanseul Kim
Assistant Professor
The University Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center at Houston
Department of Epidemiology
My research focuses on understanding how diet and the gut microbiome work together to influence the development of gastrointestinal (GI) and liver diseases, including colorectal cancer and liver cancer. I use large human cohort data, such as the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which include detailed information on diet, lifestyle, and long-term health outcomes. By combining these longitudinal datasets with microbiome multi-omic profiles (metagenomics, metabolomics, and metatranscriptomics), my work aims to identify microbial and metabolic markers that contribute to cancer risk and progression.
Projects in our lab apply statistical and epidemiologic methods, such as survival analysis and causal inference, alongside data science approaches to study how dietary patterns and microbial functions change over time and how these changes relate to diseases. Another area of focus is precision nutrition, exploring how individual differences in the gut microbiome and metabolic responses to foods can inform more personalized and effective dietary strategies for cancer prevention and management.
Our research provides hands-on experience with large-scale cohort and multi-omics data, high-performance computing, and analytical tools such as R, SAS, and Python, while fostering collaboration and promoting integrative approaches that connect data science, epidemiology, nutrition, and microbiology to advance public health and biomedical research.
Education & Training
PhD, Harvard University, 2022