Kim Barrett
Kim E. Barrett is a research physiologist, specialising in digestive disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Medicine and was formerly Dean of the Graduate Division at UCSD. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physiology and a Past-President of the American Physiological Society.
Kim is a native of the United Kingdom, and earned her PhD in Biological Chemistry and her BSc in Medicinal Chemistry, both from University College London in 1982 and 1979 respectively. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the laboratory of Dean Metcalfe before moving to UCSD in 1985. Since 2020, she has been serving as the rotating Director of the Division of Graduate Education in the Education and Human Resources Directorate of the National Science Foundation in Alexandria, VA.
She has received numerous honors for her research, teaching, mentoring and service activities. For example, she received the degree of Doctor of Medical Science, honoris causa, from Queen's University Belfast and the Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen Distinguished Scientist and Mentor Award from the American Physiological Society. She was also the 2015 Bayliss-Starling Prize Lecturer of The Physiological Society.
She is the lead author for Ganong's Review of Medical Physiology, currently in its 26th edition, and sole author of Gastrointestinal Physiology, also published by McGraw-Hill.
Her research focuses on the transport and barrier properties of the gastrointestinal epithelium and how these are deranged in the setting of various disease processes. Her work is relevant to the understanding of diarrheal diseases, particularly those caused by infectious agents such as Salmonella, and also to the mechanism of action of probiotics.
