Kim Orth

Kim Orth is the Earl A. Forsythe chair in biomedical science and professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UT Southwestern, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Her research focuses on bacterial pathogenesis. Her groundbreaking work helps identify bacterial virulence factors and uncover their molecular activity. The repertoire of tools she used to decipher these novel activities allowed her to continue studies on metazoan AMPylation in model organisms, including flies and mice, where her lab ultimately created a pre-clinical murine model for neonatal diabetes that is caused by an analogous mutation in AMPylation machinery found in humans. Her lab continues to discover new biology and signaling pathways, including transertion, from bacterial pathogens.

Orth is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the National Academy of Sciences. Among the awards Orth has received are the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, Burroughs Wellcome Investigator in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease and Welch Foundation Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Science. In 2018, she received the ASBMB Merck Award and wrote a solicited, personal reflection on her path in science for the Journal of Biological Chemistry to provide tools for younger scientists.

She received her B.A. in biochemistry from Texas A &M University; her M.S. in Biological Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles; and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. While becoming the mother of two, she did multiple productive postdoctoral fellowships at University of Michigan studying mismatch repair with ovarian cancer, apoptosis, cellular signal transduction, enzymology, and finally host-pathogen interactions.