Taeju Park is research faculty at Children’s Mercy Research Institute, Children’s Mercy Kansas City and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. He received a Ph.D. from Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, South Korea. Since he joined Dr. Tom Curran’s lab at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2002 as a postdoctoral fellow, he generated genetically engineered mouse and cell culture models to study essential overlapping roles of two structurally and functionally related proteins, Crk and CrkL. After he moved to Children’s Mercy Kansas City in 2016, he studies tumorigenic functions of Crk and CrkL and is developing specific inhibitors of the proteins to block tumor cell migration and invasion.
