Rate My Professor Daniel Kim-Shapiro

Daniel B. Kim-Shapiro is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at Wake Forest University, holding the Harbert Family Distinguished Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. He serves as Director of the Translational Science Center. Kim-Shapiro earned a B.A. in Physics from Carleton College in 1984, with a senior thesis on Hidden Variables Theories and Bell's Inequality. He received an M.S. in Physics from Southern Illinois University, where his thesis utilized Feynman Path Integrals to calculate the Aharonov-Bohm Effect. In 1993, he obtained a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, conducting dissertation research on polarized light scattering to examine chromosome structure, primarily at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Following his doctorate, he completed postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the laboratory of David S. Kliger. There, supported by an NIH National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship, he developed nanosecond time-resolved linear dichroism and circular birefringence techniques to study ligand binding kinetics of sickle cell hemoglobin polymers. Kim-Shapiro joined the faculty at Wake Forest University in 1996.

His biophysics research centers on nitric oxide and nitrite reactions with hemoglobin in cardiovascular physiology, including nitrite reduction to nitric oxide by deoxyhemoglobin for vasodilation, hemoglobin's nitrite reductase activity under allosteric control, and nitrite's roles in hypoxic signaling, cytoprotection, and as a vascular endocrine nitric oxide reservoir. The Kim-Shapiro lab applies physical and biological tools to cardiovascular health challenges such as blood storage lesions, sickle cell disease, and dietary nitrate effects on exercise endurance in aging and heart failure. Key publications include "Nitrite reduction to nitric oxide by deoxyhemoglobin vasodilates the human circulation" (Nature Medicine, 2003), "Nitrate and nitrite in biology, nutrition and therapeutics" (Nature Chemical Biology, 2009), "The emerging biology of the nitrite anion" (Nature Chemical Biology, 2005), and "Enzymatic function of hemoglobin as a nitrite reductase that produces NO under allosteric control" (Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2005). The lab has received continuous funding from the NIH Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for over ten years and from the American Heart Association. Kim-Shapiro is co-inventor on patents such as "Use of Nitrite Salts for the Treatment of Cardiovascular Conditions." Awards include the Excellence in Research Award in 2002 and appointment as the first Harbert Family Distinguished Chair in 2009.