Kathleen M. Ruppel, MD, PhD

"Use our adapting climate as a tool; so many more paths are available."

Kathleen Ruppel, PhD grew up in Maryland and attended Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where she majored in chemistry. She then attended Stanford University School of Medicine, where she completed her MD and PhD in Biochemistry through the National Institutes of Health Medical Scientist Training Program. 

Upon completion of her degrees, Dr. Ruppel did a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and then returned to the West Coast for a fellowship in pediatric cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco. She remained on faculty at UCSF until 2010, studying heart development, when she decided to return to Stanford to initiate a program studying the molecular basis of heart muscle diseases called cardiomyopathies with her former mentor Dr. James Spudich. She has remained at Stanford for the past 13 years, and her research helped lead to the discovery of the first drug ever approved for the treatment of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. In the past 4 years, She has become involved in biotech, cofounding two companies that are dedicated to targeting cytoskeletal proteins to treat malaria and other parasitic diseases (Kainomyx, Inc.) and cancer (Cyntegron, Inc.).