Dr. KC did his undergraduate studies at the University of Colorado, followed by MD/PhD at Washington University School of Medicine. During his combined degree training, he developed his initial interest in how the immune system shapes many aspects of health. After graduating medical school, Dr. KC completed his medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the past several years, Dr. KC developed a growing interest in understanding the primary determinants of age-related chronic inflammation. His work in the laboratory of Dr. John Wherry focuses on one emerging determinant of this shifting immune landscape, the unavoidable acquisition of somatic mutations that can confers a selective advantage to a subset of hematopoietic stem cell, a phenomenon called clonal hematopoiesis (CH). His research program seeks to apply cutting-edge genomics, advanced genome editing, and multidimensional cytometry to build a cohesive model of how CH-affiliated variants fundamentally re-wires immune populations and thus predisposes to chronic inflammation.