Karen Oegema

Karen Oegema is Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at University of California, San Diego, where she heads up a research group. Oegema is also Head of the Laboratory of Mitotic Mechanisms in the San Diego branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Her research interests are centered on the interface between cell and cancer biology. Her work is focused on mechanistic approaches to dissecting the molecular machinery that controls cell division and development, and how variation in the cell division machinery between cell types can be exploited to engineer chemotherapeutic strategies. 

Oegema was a Pew fellow in the Biomedical Sciences and has received multiple awards from the American Society of Cell. She is a monitoring editor for the Journal of Cell Biology and a lifetime fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology. She received her Ph.D. from University of California, San Francisco.