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Kathleen Woulfe PhD
(She/Her)
Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology, University of Colorado School of Medicine
- Cardiology (SOM)
Background
Kathleen Woulfe, PhD, received her PhD from Thomas Jefferson University.
Research + Funding
In 2018, Dr. Woulfe was a Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) scholar for her project titled, “Determining Midkine’s Role in Female Pediatric Heart Failure Pathology.” This Ludeman Center-funded project advanced a discovery she made in her postdoctoral work that found that midkine, a unique cytokine, is significantly higher in the hearts of pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) patients compared to age-matched donors. Her research determined that midkine is significantly upregulated in the serum of girls with DCM who require transplantation compared to girls with DCM who recover, and this increase does not occur in boys with DCM. They developed a mouse model to understand the c onsequences of increased circulating serum midkine in male and female juvenile mice.
In 2019, she received additional funding for her project titled, “Defining Sex-Specific Responses to Elevated Midkine in Cardiomyocytes.” This work focused on the development and characterization of a juvenile cell culture model to study the how midkine affects cardiomyocytes from young male and female rats.
“The Ludeman Center provides incredible support to early-career faculty in the form of excellent career development and mentorship. Moreover, the study of sex differences in basic physiology and pathology is essential for improving our understanding of diseases and developing therapeutics and the center’s passion for and support of this type of research is critical,” Dr. Woulfe.
Transforming Women’s Health
During her career, Dr. Woulfe has been fascinated by the subtle differences between male and female hearts. The underlying cornerstone of her independent laboratory is to compare male and female heart function at different ages and identify factors that contribute to those differences. This passion has become more prominent with the continual discoveries about these differences and see how males and females respond to therapies in disparate ways.
