Angela Koehler, Ph.D.

Angela Koehler is an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a member of the steering committee for the Broad’s Cancer Program. Her research group aims to discover and develop functional small-molecule probes of transcriptional regulators, including chromatin modifying enzymes and oncogenic transcription factors. Validated probes may be used to advance the understanding of transcription in development and disease. Selected probes may be developed into imaging agents, diagnostic tools, or therapeutic leads.

In addition to her role at the Broad, Koehler is the Goldblith Career Development Professor in Applied Biology in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and an intramural member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Koehler is also a member of MIT’s Committee on Pre-Health Advising, which primes students for training in medical school. She also co-directs MIT’s biomedical engineering minor program. In addition, Koehler is a founding member of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine. She co-directs the High Throughput Screening Facility at MIT, focused on bringing automation to a broad spectrum of experimental activities.

Koehler received her B.A. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Reed College. There she worked under the guidance of Arthur Glasfeld on structural and biochemical studies of proteins that recognize tRNA or DNA. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University where she worked with Stuart Schreiber to develop novel technologies for identifying and characterizing interactions between proteins and small molecules. Upon graduation, she became an institute fellow in the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute and a group leader for the NCI Initiative for Chemical Genetics. She was also a project leader in the NCI Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD²) Center at the Broad Institute aimed at targeting causal cancer genes with small molecules. Koehler is also a recipient of a Merkin Institute Fellowship at the Broad.