Mark W. Kunkel, Ph.D.

Mark W. Kunkel, Ph.D., joined the Molecular Pharmacology Branch in 2023 after spending a decade in the Drug Synthesis and Chemistry Branch and a decade before that in the Information Technology Branch. His graduate work at The University of Texas in Houston focused on cell signaling using classical biochemical methods. During post-doctoral work at Parke Davis Pharmaceuticals he transitioned to experimental oncology in mouse models of human cancer, and subsequently at the Arizona Cancer Center he transitioned to informatics while establishing core facilities for the then-new microarray technology and for a high-throughput screening facility for target-directed screening of chemical libraries. This last effort led to collaborations with DTP using the COMPARE algorithm to analyze results and, ultimately, to his move to DTP. His current efforts focus on the integration of cell line data results from the classic NCI60 screen and the new NCI60 HTS384 screen as well as other public cell line data sets that are not part of the NCI60 screen, and an on-going effort to interpret, rationalize and standardize "computerized" chemical structure information that was gathered by NCI before there were standards for this kind of information.