Winston Patrick Kuo

Biography

Winston Kuo completed his education at Columbia University earning his dental degree. He went on and completed a two-year dental General Practice Residency program at Catholic Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. In addition he completed specialty training in Pediatric Dentistry at the University of Southern California and Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center. He then enrolled into an Oral Medicine program at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and before he completed his program he transferred to Harvard School of Dental Medicine and completed his Doctorate in Oral Biology and dental specialties in Oral Medicine and Dental Informatics. At the same time he completed his Medical Informatics degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research

He was the first to compare DNA microarray platforms on a large scale. He further developed a framework for comparing DNA microarrays at a graduate student in Connie Cepko's lab in the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, which addressed issues related to the reliability of DNA microarrays. He also worked with Lucila Ohno-Machado from the Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Peter Park from the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Children's Hospital . He is currently in the process of finishing up the data analyses portion of this latter study and several manuscripts have recently been published . He also was a participant of the MAQC study led by Leming Shi.

Kuo has another role as a post-doc in Arhat Abzhanov's lab at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is currently trying to understand craniofacial abnormalities related to bone and cartilage. Craniofacial abnormalities are some of the most common structural birth defects that are often associated with developmental disabilities, abnormalities to brain maturation, hearing loss, functional problems related to breathing, eating, and speech. Children with these malformations and disabilities generally require an interdisciplinary team composing of many specialties for most of their life. Impaired cranial bone formation and remodeling can contribute to many of these craniofacial abnormalities such as Apert’s, Crouzon’s, Treacher-Collins, Pierre Robin Complex, hemifacial microsomia, etc. Great strides have been made in identifying the genetic etiologies of a number of syndromes, though the pathogenesis of the developing cranial skeletal structures still remains poorly understood. His research focuses on roles of microRNAs in craniofacial development in general and in skull development in particular. A conditional knock-out mutation in Dicer, which is involved in microRNAs processing, with several cre-LoxP lines that target various craniofacial and skeletal tissues and structures will be used to describe the overall roles for miRNAs in craniofacial development. Preliminary results showed a profound yet specific intramebranous (dermal) bone phenotype. His goals are to better characterize the nature of miRNA involvement and search for specific microRNAs involved in cranial development. He plans to study the transcriptional activity of multiple skeletogenic markers and signaling molecules using microRNA and DNA microarrays, and of key classes of kinase-dependent pathways using kinase-protein chips.

In addition, he was part of a team that identifies a gene linked to beak length in Darwin's Finches. Kuo analyzed the data that used the living ancestral vampire finch as a reference and compared the short-beaked ground finches to the long-billed morphology of the cactus finches.