CALLIE KWARTLER, PH.D.

​Postdoctoral Research Fellow
UTHealth

Dr. Callie Kwartler grew up here in Houston, TX. She earned her B.A. in Biology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and returned to Houston to get her Ph.D. here at the M.D. Anderson UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She did her dissertation research in the laboratory of Dianna Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D. studying the molecular mechanisms of vascular disease in patients with rare variants in MYH11. In 2013, Dr. Kwartler moved to UTSouthwestern to take a postdoctoral fellowship position in the laboratory of Thomas Carroll, Ph.D. in the Division of Nephrology, where she worked on the development of the renal stroma in the mouse embryo. In 2016, she returned to the laboratory of Dianna Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D. to do a second postdoctoral fellowship, and over the past three years she has established an induced pluripotent stem cell-based model system to study the causes of strokes in children. In her career to date, Dr. Kwartler has published 16 original research articles including 6 as first author. She has won numerous awards, including a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association and the 2018 Best Mentor Award, Postdoc Category sponsored by Proteintech. Most recently, she took first place in the 2019 Deans’ Excellence in Postdoctoral Research award competition.