Curiosity and Drive Put Shriners Children’s Boston Researchers at the Forefront of Innovation and Discovery

As a young child, Murat Karabacak looked at objects and pondered, "How can I make this? What is this composed of?" He was fascinated by the ingredients in his favorite foods and wondered how taste worked. He also wondered how the trillions of cells in his body could form a hand or even a lung. The idea of understanding matter riveted him. Murat's fascination with science led him to study chemistry at Bilkent University in Turkey, his home country. Murat came to Boston for a physics internship at Harvard University during his junior year. He fell in love with the rich culture and myriad opportunities for scientists in the city.

After earning his Ph.D. in chemistry with a specialization in quantitative biology from Brandeis University, Dr. Karabacak joined the Center for Engineering and Surgery as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011. He was promoted to Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2016. He also joined the research team at Shriners Children's Boston and currently helps oversee the mass spectrometer facility.

The field of mass spectrometry is about measurement. Thinking back to Dr. Karabacak's childhood curiosity, mass spectrometry can help answer those questions by measuring one of the most simple properties of matter, mass. Mass analysis can help decipher the makeup of matter from objects to humans. At Shriners Children's Boston, the state-of-the-art mass spectrometer (technically, a triple-TOF LC/MS) allows researchers to discover metabolic and signaling pathways more comprehensively for various biomedical applications. These applications include determining the cause of hypermetabolism after burn injury, understanding the underlying mechanism of wound healing following burn injuries, or evaluating immune responses during sepsis and graft rejection.