Draft:Joseph E. Kumka

Joseph E. Kumka is an American physician-scientist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for his research on transcriptional control in the facultative photosynthetic bacterium Rhodobacter capsulatus and on ovarian and uterine cancer transcriptomics and metabolomics. He received his PhD in 2015 from Indiana University Bloomington and his MD in 2022 from the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Early life and education
Kumka was born in Chortkiv, Ukraine. He spent his early childhood in the nearby town of Terebolia until the age of 10, when his family moved to Colorado, United States. They later relocated to Minnesota, where Kumka completed his undergraduate studies.

He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 2009. Kumka then pursued his PhD in the Interdisciplinary Biochemistry Graduate Program at Indiana University Bloomington, completing it in 2015. His dissertation, titled "Global transcriptional control of photosynthetic and aerobic events in Rhodobacter capsulatus", was supervised by Carl E. Bauer in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry.

Career
From 2015-2016, Kumka was a postdoctoral research fellow at Mayo Clinic, where he studied ovarian and uterine cancer transcriptomics and metabolomics under Vijayalakshmi Shridhar. He then worked as a Scientist at Meridian Bioscience from 2017-2018, focusing on bioprocessing improvement of intellectual property acquisitions.

Kumka completed his M.D. at the University of Minnesota in 2022. He did a year of surgical training in 2022 at Montefiore in the Bronx, New York. In 2023, he transitioned to the Physician Scientist Training Program in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at the University of Minnesota.

Research
Kumka's research focuses on understanding the transcriptional changes that allow Rhodobacter capsulatus to switch between anaerobic photosynthetic and aerobic respiratory growth modes. Using RNA sequencing and ChIP-sequencing, he defined the regulon (set of genes regulated by a single regulatory protein) controlled by the transcription factor FnrL and showed that it regulates various photosynthetic processes previously thought to be outside its control.

Kumka also identified new transcription factors likely to be important for photosynthetic and aerobic growth states in R. capsulatus. One such regulator he characterized is RCC03255, which represses the cytochrome cbb3 operon (a group of co-regulated genes) important for aerobic respiration.

His work has provided fundamental insights into the physiological and transcriptional differences between anaerobic photosynthetic and aerobic respiratory growth in R. capsulatus, with broader implications for understanding bacterial metabolism and physiology.

In addition to his work on R. capsulatus, Kumka has also studied transcriptomics and metabolomics in ovarian and uterine cancers, identifying genes associated with bowel metastases in ovarian cancer and therapeutic vulnerabilities in treatment-refractory ovarian cancer cell lines.

Awards and honors

 * Shapiro and Bloom Scholarship, University of Minnesota Medical School (2018-2022)
 * Presidents Scholarship Match Variety Endowment Scholarship, University of Minnesota Medical School (2019-2020)
 * Bonnie Espeland Memorial Medical Student Scholarship, University of Minnesota Medical School (2018-2019)
 * Specialized Programs of Research Excellence Grant, Mayo Clinic - Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology (2016)
 * Velocity Entrepreneurship Conference Fellow Grant, Indiana University (2014)
 * Original Research Proposal Competition, University of Wisconsin (2014)
 * Peglow Grant, Indiana University - Department of Biochemistry (2013)
 * Research and Training Merit Scholarship, Indiana University - Department of Biochemistry (2009-2011)

Selected publications