Associate Professor Hajin Kim

Associate Professor Hajin Kim is a biomedical engineer at the Single Molecule Biophysics Laboratory, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea.

We look at “Life”, molecule by molecule. Single molecule approaches to biology and biophysics reveal unforeseen details about the building blocks of biology. From these, we can understand the role of fluctuations and the interplay of biomolecules, to open new insights into their functioning. As much as these insights provide answers to scientific questions, they can provide novel strategies toward biomedical problems.

We develop and combine cutting-edge single molecule and single cell techniques to solve important problems in biological science, including the organization and dynamics of chromosomes, biomolecular recognition/assembly, and molecular machinery working on nucleic acids. Our study requires cross-disciplinary efforts from biologists, physicists, chemists, and engineering scientists and thus we pursue collaborations with groups from diverse scientific disciplines.

Current research topics:  Single molecule ribosome assembly (Sarah Woodson group at JHU) Mitochondrial transcription initiation (Smita Patel group at UMDNJ) Intrinsically disordered proteins – IκBα/NF-κB (Elizabeth Komives group at UCSD) Dynamics of L7/L12 ribosomal protein (Steven Chu)

Brief career history

Nov 2009 – Dec 2013 Research Associate at Howard Hughes Medical Institute Experience (Taekjip Ha group)

May 2009 – Nov 2009  Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Taekjip Ha group)

Dec 2006 – May 2009 Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University (Steven Chu group) 

Selected publications

  1. *Hajin Kim, *Sanjaya Abeysirigunawardena, Kaushik Ragunathan, Megan Mayerle, Ke Chen, Zaida Luthey-Schulten, Taekjip Ha, and Sarah Woodson “Protein-Guided RNA Dynamics during Early Ribosome Assembly” Nature (2014)
  2. Jorge A. Lamboy, Hajin Kim, Holly Dembinski, Taekjip Ha, and Elizabeth Komives, “Single molecule FRET reveals the energy landscape of the native state dynamics of the IB ankyrin repeat domain” J. Mol. Biol. (2013)
  3. Hajin Kim and Taekjip Ha, “Single Molecule Nanometry for Biological Physics” Reports on Progress in Physics (2013)
  4. Ibrahim Cisse, Hajin Kim, and Taekjip Ha, “A Rule of Seven in Watson-Crick Base Pairing of Mismatched Sequences” Nature Struct. Mol. Biol. (2012)
  5. Ke Chen, John Eargle, Jonathan Lai, Hajin Kim, Taekjip Ha, Megan Mayerle, Sarah Woodson, and Zaida Luthey-Schulten, “Assembly of the Five-way Junction in the Ribosomal Small Subunit Using Hybrid MD-Go Simulations” Journal of Physical Chemistry B (2012)

Website

South Korea
Languages: 
English
Korean
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