Our Team

Amy has lived in the St. Louis metropolitan region her entire life, having been a member of the Washington University cancer research community for over 20 years. Amy joined our lab in 2012 as lab supervisor, and she spends much of her time in lab maintaining our mouse colony and helping others with their experiments. Amy’s favorite thing about working here is all of the people she has met from all over the world.

Jun got her Ph.D. from The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and joined Dr. Link’s lab in 2006. Jun has been working on a severe congenital neutropenia (SCN)  project, trying to understand the molecular mechanism underlying the SCN pathogenesis and its high risk to develop into MDS/AML. Jun is also working on the use of novel therapeutic strategies for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) by targeting leukemia-stromal interactions.

Jeremy received his PhD training in biomedical sciences, working on the Notch signaling pathway in vascular smooth muscle cells in the laboratory of Dr. Brenda Lilly at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH. He went on to a postdoctoral position at the University of Chicago in the labs of Drs. Jill de Jong and Megan McNerney, studying T-ALL in zebrafish models and chromosome 7 tumor suppressor genes in myeloid malignancies. He joined the lab of Dr. Link in 2020, and is currently working on multiple projects involving TP53 in clonal hematopoiesis and myeloid malignancies. He has recently been awarded an Evans MDS Young Investigator Award for investigating a potential synthetic lethality in TP53-mutant MDS/AML, and is building towards starting his own independent laboratory research program.

Kim is an MD-PhD student in the Molecular Genetics and Genomics PhD program. Before joining Wash U’s Medical Scientist Training Program, she completed undergraduate studies in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is broadly interested in hematopoietic development, and in elucidating genetic changes underlying the pathogenesis of hematologic malignancies. 

Joey is an unorthodox MD, PhD,  candidate, completing his PhD in Molecular Genetics & Genomics before transitioning to the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University School of Medicine in fall 2022. Joey’s research interests focus on the hematopoietic stem cell bone marrow niches – alterations in hematopoiesis under stress or with chronologic aging – as well as the role of nucleolar stress in T cell development and T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia transformation.

Julia completed her PhD (2015) training in immunology, working on receptor signaling downstream of the osteoclastogenic cytokine RANKL in the laboratory of Dr. Steven Teitelbaum. After completing her MD (2015), she went on to residency in pediatrics at the Washington University/St. Louis Children’s hospital program as part of the American Board of Pediatrics Accelerated Research Pathway and as a member of the Oliver Langenburg Physician Scientist Training Program. After her first year of clinical Pediatric Hematology/Oncology training, she developed a deep appreciation for the neutrophil seeing the profound impact on patients who cannot make granulocytes for a variety of reasons. She joined the lab of Dr. Link in 2018 working initially on TP53 in clonal hematopoiesis and the development of myeloid malignancy, and subsequently on identifying novel germline variants causing severe congenital neutropenia (SCN). She is currently working to dissect the mechanisms of CLPB-related neutropenia using studies of metabolism and mitochondrial function, the focus of a recently awarded K99/R00 grant from the NHLBI, and plans to continue this work in her own independent laboratory research program.

Robin recently completed her PhD in the Molecular Cell Biology program and has stayed on as a postdoc for a short time as her husband finishes medical school. She completed her undergraduate studies in National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, before coming to WashU for graduate school. She is interested in the pathogenesis of hematological malignancies. Specifically, her project focuses on the contribution of the bone marrow microenvironment to the disease development of MDS and its transformation to AML.