Currently

PhD Candidate at Oregon Health and Science University

Studying low-microbial biomass human specimens (urine and blood) with respect to prostate disorders
Developing bioinformatic pipelines

Education

2010 - 2015 University of Notre Dame

B.S. Chemical Engineering
B.A. German Language and Literature

Research positions

PhD graduate student, Knight Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR; 09/2017 – present.

Research Assistant, Suzanne Conzen laboratory, University of Chicago, Chicago IL; 08/2015 – 08/2017

Summer intern researcher, Xiaohu Gao laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; 06/2014 – 08/2014.

Skills

Experience handling and processing human clinical trial samples
Wet lab: Mammalian cell culture, lentiviral transduction, murine models, DNA extraction, next generation sequencing, droplet-digital PCR, fluorescence microscopy
Programming: R (ggplot2, tidyverse, phyloseq), RMarkdown, Python (pandas, NumPy)

Awards and Honors

Co-chair of Data Committee on Diversity Advisory Committee within the Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Centers (11/2020 – 11/2021)
Frictionless Fellow for Reproducible Data through the Open Knowledge Foundation (08/2020 – 04/2021)
Awarded CEDAR funding for Bloodbugs: Microbiome Profiling for Early Cancer (09/2019 – present)

Memberships in professional societies

AFSCME Graduate Researchers United, 2020 – present
American Society for Microbiology, 2019 – present
American Association for Cancer Research, 2018 – present
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2017 – present
Women in Science, Portland, 2017 – present

Student mentoring and outreach

Anagha Shenoy and Elizabeth Ruitt, Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology Summer Research program, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR; 06/2022-08/2022.

Palmer Bassett, Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology Summer Research program, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR; 06/2021-08/2021.

Volunteer at OHSU covid-19 vaccine clinic, Portland, OR 01/2021

Science fair judge, Northwest Science Expo, Portland Public Schools, Portland, OR 04/09/20.

Guest panelist, Knight Scholars program, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR; 7/10/19.

Alyce Oh, undergraduate researcher, The Cancer Undergraduate Research Education (CURE), University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; 05/2017-08/2017.

Publications

Kate Bowie, Jodi Lapidus, Mark Garzotto, Eric Orwoll, Lisa Karstens. Microbial diversity predicts obstructive and irritative lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in older community-dwelling US men.. In preparation.

Eva Tonsing-Carter, Kyle M. Hernandez, Caroline R. Kim, Ryan V. Harkless, Alyce Oh, Kathleen R. Bowie, Diana C. West-Szymanski, Mayra A. Betancourt-Ponce, Bradley D. Green, Ricardo R. Lastra, Gini F. Fleming, Sarat Chandarlapaty and Suzanne D. Conzen. Glucocorticoid receptor modulation decreases ER-positive breast cancer cell proliferation and suppresses wild-type and mutant ER chromatin association. Breast Cancer Research 2019. 21:82

Diana Christine West, Masha Kocherginsky, Eva Y. Tonsing-Carter, Deniz Nesli Dolcen, David J Hosfield, Ricardo R. Lastra, Jason P Sinnwell, Kevin J Thompson, Kathleen R. Bowie, Ryan V Harkless, Maxwell N. Skor, Charles F. Pierce, Sarah C Styke, Caroline R Kim, Larischa de Wet, Geoffrey L Greene, Judy C. Boughey, Matthew P Goetz, Krishna R. Kalari, Liewei Wang, Gini F Fleming, Balázs Győrffy and Suzanne D. Conzen. Discovery of a glucocorticoid receptor (GR) activity signature using selective GR antagonism in ER-negative breast cancer. Clinical Cancer Research April 2018.

Diana C. West, Deng Pan, Eva Y. Tonsing-Carter, Kyle M. Hernandez, Charles F. Pierce, Sarah C. Styke, Kathleen R. Bowie, Tzintzuni I. Garcia, Masha Kocherginsky, and Suzanne D. Conzen. GR and ER co-activation alters the expression of differentiation genes and associates with improved ER+ breast cancer outcome. Molecular Cancer Research August 2017.

Poster presentations at professional meetings

Bowie, K.R., Fischer, J., Dahl, E.M., Karstens, L., (2022). Microbial DNA in Blood: Does Fraction Matter?. Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting. Lake Arrowhead, CA.

Bowie, K.R., Lapidus, J., Garzotto, M., Orwoll, E., Karstens, L., (2022). The Urinary Microbiome (Urobiome) Among Older Community-Dwelling Men with and without LUTS. Society of Urodynamics, Female Pelvic Medicine, and Urogenital Reconstruction (SUFU) 2022, San Diego, CA. (moderated poster session)

Bowie, K.R., Furst, A., Schleisman, M., Jallow, F., Davin, S., Rosenbaum, J.T., Karstens, L. (2020). To flow or not to flow: considerations for quantitative microbiome profiling. ASM Microbe 2020, Chicago, IL.

Bowie, K.R., Fischer, J., Kulkarni, R. (2019). Bloodbugs: microbiome profiling for early cancer. The Early Detection of Cancer Conference, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

Bowie, K.R., Modestino, A., Dixon, S., Heller, M., Ibsen, S. (2018). Dielectrophoresis-based Rapid Purification of Bacterial DNA from Human Blood and Plasma as a potential cancer biomarker. The Early Detection of Cancer Conference, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR.