Katrina Blount, PhD

Dr. Blount is an Associate Research Scientist in Nephrology, where she coordinates clinical trials for autosomal dominant polycystic disease (ADPKD). She completed her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology and Philosophy of Science at Hampshire College in 1991, and later worked as a Research Technologist at Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her doctorate in Biochemistry in 2000 at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Her thesis work established specificity parameters for a class of enzymes, the Double-Stranded RNA Adenosine Deaminases (ADARs), that modulate gene expression in cellular and viral pathways. She was an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where she focused on ribonucleoprotein (RNP) assembly and RNA localization. For eight years, she was a Senior Regulatory Analyst at the Yale University Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) where she performed scientific and regulatory review of diverse human subjects research in the biomedical, social and behavioral sciences, and she became a Certified IRB Professional (CIP) in 2012.