Kimberly Kwei
Kimberly Kwei earned the Toffler Scholar Award in 2023 at Columbia University
Biography
The daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants, Kimberly Kwei was born in Stanford, California. Dr. Kwei’s parents initially came to the United States so that her father could study and work, but they decided to stay when they realized they were pregnant with their first child. They both valued learning and wanted their children to explore and pursue their interests in the United States’s more open educational system.
Dr. Kwei’s father, who she describes as a “jack of all trades,” has worked in various lines of business. She fondly remembers a story about her father’s time as a waiter. One day, the chef suddenly left without warning. So her dad ran back to the kitchen and just started cooking meals. Her mother has always been passionate about education and loves working with children, so she opened a Kumon Center, which provides tutoring to children through high school.Both Dr. Kwei and her two younger sisters attended the center throughout their formative years.
Neither of Dr. Kwei’s parents restricted their daughters’ interests or dictated the educational subjects they should pursue. This instilled a deep passion for learning. She discovered that she loved anything that fed her curiosity, but particularly enjoyed math, reading, and science. In elementary school, she had a microscope, but her family couldn’t afford the ready-made slide samples. So she improvised by collecting dead bugs from around the house and using them to fashion her own make-shift slides. Growing up, Dr. Kwei also played the piano and the flute. She still plays the piano and is now teaching her own children how to play.
At a very young age, Dr. Kwei knew she wanted to be a doctor. When her first grade teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up, she drew a picture of herself wearing a white lab coat. But when she graduated high school and started her freshman year at Amherst College in London, she found herself gravitating toward science. She began working in labs, first studying a dog model of narcolepsy and eventually researching long-term potentiation, a molecular correlate for memory, ultimately working alongside Tim Bliss, the neuroscientist who discovered long-term potentiation.
Dr. Kwei thrived in the lab environment and was fascinated by the research; so after graduating with her BA in Chemistry and Neuroscience,
she decided to continue her work there for a year before pursuing her graduate studies. She credits her time working in laboratories throughout and after college as fueling and cementing her passion for understanding the brain and how it works.
A year later, Dr. Kwei started graduate school at Mount Sinai in New York City, where she earned her MD PhD in Neuroscience. While completing her clinical rotations, Dr. Kwie discovered she loved working 1:1 with patients just as much as she loved doing research. And so today, Dr. Kwei is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CIUMC) as well as a practicing, board-certified neurologist with subspecialty training in the field of movement disorders. She finished a fellowship in movement disorders at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, during which time she was the Edmond J. Safra Fellow in Movement Disorders.
Dr. Kwei’s research focuses on developing a better understanding of gait issues in Parkinson’s disease (PD) which, unlike other symptoms of PD, does not respond to treatment. Specifically, she is studying a gait abnormality called freezing of gait (FOG). With FOG, a patient is suddenly unable to walk mid-stride or mid-motion, often while turning, walking in a confined space, or navigating a situation that seems to require increased cognitive functionality. FOG is most commonly encountered in advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, but it is also seen in many atypical parkinsonisms, for instance early on in progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), vascular parkinsonism, and normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).
“Going forward, I really want to embark on a basic science research program that’s focused on understanding how different pathways in the brain make everything work. Because if we can truly understand what’s going on in the brain, we can understand what to do when things go wrong.”
- Dr. Kimberly Kwei
BIOGRAPHY
The daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants, Kimberly Kwei was born in Stanford, California. Dr. Kwei’s parents initially came to the United States so that her father could study and work, but they decided to stay when they realized they were pregnant with their first child. They both valued learning and wanted their children to explore and pursue their interests in the United States’s more open educational system.
Dr. Kwei’s father, who she describes as a “jack of all trades,” has worked in various lines of business. She fondly remembers a story about her father’s time as a waiter. One day, the chef suddenly left without warning. So her dad ran back to the kitchen and just started cooking meals. Her mother has always been passionate about education and loves working with children, so she opened a Kumon Center, which provides tutoring to children through high school.Both Dr. Kwei and her two younger sisters attended the center throughout their formative years.
Neither of Dr. Kwei’s parents restricted their daughters’ interests or dictated the educational subjects they should pursue. This instilled a deep passion for learning. She discovered that she loved anything that fed her curiosity, but particularly enjoyed math, reading, and science. In elementary school, she had a microscope, but her family couldn’t afford the ready-made slide samples. So she improvised by collecting dead bugs from around the house and using them to fashion her own make-shift slides. Growing up, Dr. Kwei also played the piano and the flute. She still plays the piano and is now teaching her own children how to play.
At a very young age, Dr. Kwei knew she wanted to be a doctor. When her first grade teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up, she drew a picture of herself wearing a white lab coat. But when she graduated high school and started her freshman year at Amherst College in London, she found herself gravitating toward science. She began working in labs, first studying a dog model of narcolepsy and eventually researching long-term potentiation, a molecular correlate for memory, ultimately working alongside Tim Bliss, the neuroscientist who discovered long-term potentiation.
Dr. Kwei thrived in the lab environment and was fascinated by the research; so after graduating with her BA in Chemistry and Neuroscience, she decided to continue her work there for a year before pursuing her graduate studies. She credits her time working in laboratories throughout and after college as fueling and cementing her passion for understanding the brain and how it works.
A year later, Dr. Kwei started graduate school at Mount Sinai in New York City, where she earned her MD PhD in Neuroscience. While completing her clinical rotations, Dr. Kwie discovered she loved working 1:1 with patients just as much as she loved doing research. And so today, Dr. Kwei is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CIUMC) as well as a practicing, board-certified neurologist with subspecialty training in the field of movement disorders. She finished a fellowship in movement disorders at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, during which time she was the Edmond J. Safra Fellow in Movement Disorders.
Dr. Kwei’s research focuses on developing a better understanding of gait issues in Parkinson’s disease (PD) which, unlike other symptoms of PD, does not respond to treatment. Specifically, she is studying a gait abnormality called freezing of gait (FOG). With FOG, a patient is suddenly unable to walk mid-stride or mid-motion, often while turning, walking in a confined space, or navigating a situation that seems to require increased cognitive functionality. FOG is most commonly encountered in advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, but it is also seen in many atypical parkinsonisms, for instance early on in progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), vascular parkinsonism, and normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).
“Going forward, I really want to embark on a basic science research program that’s focused on understanding how different pathways in the brain make everything work. Because if we can truly understand what’s going on in the brain, we can understand what to do when things go wrong.”
- Dr. Kimberly Kwei
Research Focus
Challenges
PD is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States, impacting nearly 600 out of 100,000 people over the age of 45. Falls account for a significant percentage of morbidity and mortality in patients living with PD, with some studies citing that 39% experience recurring falls. FOG can occur at any time and without warning when a patient is moving or attempting to move. For these patients, the fear of falling has an increasingly negative impact on their quality of life. While most of the motor issues caused by PD are well controlled by pharmacologic therapies and surgical intervention for nearly the duration of a patient’s PD disease course, FOG does not usually respond to standard PD treatment.
Focus and Priorities
The failure of FOG to respond to gold standard treatments for the other motor symptoms of PD suggests that it may have a different pathophysiology. The current understanding of FOG suggests that dysfunction is occurring at various levels of locomotion, including the cortex, basal ganglia (situated at the base of the forebrain and top of the midbrain), and the spinal cord. To develop a better foundational understanding of the mechanisms at play, Dr. Kwei is going to study gait at the level of the cortex in NPH patients, at the level of the basal ganglia in PD patients with deep brain
stimulation devices (DBS), and at the level of the spinal cord in FOG patients with spinal cord stimulators (SCS).
Dr. Kwei hypothesizes that, while FOG occurring in these parkinsonian syndromes appears clinically indistinguishable, fine quantitative comparisons of FOG among parkinsonian syndromes, using video capture algorithms to quantify locomotion parameters of gait, may enable us to identify both common and unique kinematic features.
Benefits
Dr. Kwei hopes that if we can understand what mechanisms cause FOG, we can begin developing treatments or therapies to minimize or eliminate its effects, not only for patients with PD, but for gait dysfunction in other neurodegenerative disorders as well. Additionally, a better understanding of how gait dynamics differ across atypical PD and idiopathic PD could greatly improve current clinical diagnostic capabilities, especially when it comes to early and more accurate diagnoses.
Karen Toffler Charitable Trust Investment
Funding from the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust will enable Dr. Kwei to hire a research assistant and recruit participants for her study. The investment will also enable Dr. Kwei to coordinate and organize the various elements required to run the study effectively. Additionally, she’ll use the funds to purchase the equipment critical to her work, including the cameras required to assess gait and the computer programs to analyze the data.
Without this funding, Dr. Kwei would not be able to pursue this preliminary phase of her research, which will establish a foundation for what she ultimately hopes to achieve: develop a quantifiable and measurable understanding of how FOG manifests across all diseases in order to facilitate earlier and more accurate diagnosis as well as effective treatments and therapies.
Karen Toffler Charitable Trust Investment
Funding from the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust will enable Dr. Kwei to hire a research assistant and recruit participants for her study. The investment will also enable Dr. Kwei to coordinate and organize the various elements required to run the study effectively. Additionally, she’ll use the funds to purchase the equipment critical to her work, including the cameras required to assess gait and the computer programs to analyze the data.
Without this funding, Dr. Kwei would not be able to pursue this preliminary phase of her research, which will establish a foundation for what she ultimately hopes to achieve: develop a quantifiable and measurable understanding of how FOG manifests across all diseases in order to facilitate earlier and more accurate diagnosis as well as effective treatments and therapies.
“We understand how practically every other organ in the body functions and, typically, how to address pathologies when they emerge. But we don’t have that with the brain. Neuroscience research is kind of the last biomedical frontier.”
- Dr. Kimberly Kwei