Assistant Professor

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

http://bama.kaist.ac.kr

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon, Republic of Korea)

Bio-inspired Nanoscale Materials for Photochemical Reactions

Nature has evolved to create a myriad of nanostructured functional materials in an extremely efficient way. Our understanding of the fundamental design principles that nature uses can provide new opportunities to design novel functional materials. I am particularly interested in the synthesis of nanoscale functional materials through biomineralization driven by interactions between peptides and inorganic compounds. It offers new synthesis routes for a variety of inorganic materials, which are environmentally benign processes performed in an aqueous milieu at ambient temperature. Furthermore, biological materials can work not only as a template for materials synthesis but also as a scaffold for complex architectures that can facilitate the transport of electronic and chemical species. A virus is a good model system to this end because it consists of multiple capsid proteins, each of which can be genetically engineered independently. My current research goal is to demonstrate that genetically modified viruses can work as a structural scaffold for building an artificial photochemical system for solar energy conversion.

2010-2011 Argonne National Laboratory, George W Beadle - Argonne Named Postdoctoral Fellow

1999-2004 Amore-Pacific Corp. R&D Center, Scientific Researcher

2010 George W. Beadle - Argonne Named Postdoctoral Fellowship

2004 DuPont Fellowship, DuPont-MIT Alliance Program

2003 Best Poster Award, 5th International Conference on Advanced Polymers via Macromolecular Engineering

1998 Japan-Korea Biomaterials Research Young Investigator's Award, the Japanese and Korean Societies for Biomaterials

1997-1999 National Fellowship, Ministry of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea