Melissa Lambeth Kemp received her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Washington. Dr. Kemp joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2006 after completing postdoctoral training at MIT. Her expertise is in computational modeling of metabolism and signal transduction, as well as developing statistical modeling tools to examine network relationships in high-dimension datasets. One major aspect of her research program focuses on quantitatively addressing how cells regulate signaling through reactive oxygen species production and reversible thiol modifications; specific applications include transient phosphatase oxidation of kinase cascades, the coordination of oxidative metabolism with stem cell differentiation, and patient-specific differences in cytotoxicity to redox-cycled chemotherapeutics as part of the NCI Cancer Systems Biology Consortium. Her research program also includes a component of developing high-throughput screening methods for assaying cue-signal-response relationships in cells and analytical tools for single cell gene expression.
Dr. Kemp currently serves as Associate Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center “Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems”. She has spearheaded the multi-site center’s computational activities by developing agent-based models of context-dependent cellular decisions to generate new hypotheses of intercellular communication in pluripotent stem cell differentiation and emergent patterning. Dr. Kemp’s career honors include a Whitaker Graduate Fellowship, Merck/CSBi postdoctoral fellowship, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, NIH New Innovator Award, and the CSB2 Prize for Innovative Measurement Methods from the Council for Systems Biology in Boston.