Prof. Hak Jun Kim

Prof. Dr. Hak Jun Kim is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Pukyong National University. He received a B.Sc. degree and M.Sc. degree in Microbiology from Pukyong National University in 1994 and 1996, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Washington State University in 2003. His major research was to express, purify, and characterize disease-related membrane proteins (MPs), and further to solve three-dimensional structures of MPs in solution. His structural work on E.coli diacylglycerol kinase was published in Science in 2009. He joined the Korea Polar Research Institute in 2006 and has worked on ice-binding proteins from psychrophiles. Since then he has found a few ice-binding proteins from sea ice and marine bacteria, microalgae, and fungi and recently solved the 3-D structure of Artic yeast ice-binding protein. He was awarded the Davincci Young Scientist Prize from the Korea Research Council of Fundamental Science and Technology in 2009. On 2013, he joined Pukyong National University.