About

About

Systems biology, applied to C1 carbon.

Postdoctoral researcher at KRIBB Center for Synthetic Biology, working on C1 microbe engineering with AI coding agents in the loop.

Research
Methanotroph and methylotroph engineering for C1 chemistry. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) of Methylorubrum extorquens under methanol stress (~800 generations, PhD work at UNIST).
Methods
Whole-genome sequencing + RNA-seq + AlphaFold3 structural analysis to read mutations as a coherent stress-response network.
Tools
Custom dry-lab tooling on top of AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code) — primer design, NGS verification, lab notebook automation — so the wet-lab cycle never has to wait. Ongoing effort to integrate code agents into ALE, RNA-seq, and WGS analyses; plan to extend across synbio pipelines to shorten the data→hypothesis→experiment iteration cycle.

Education

  • Ph.D. (Integrated M.S./Ph.D.), Chemical Engineering
    Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)
    Systems Biology and Machine Learning Lab, advisor: Donghyuk Kim, Ph.D.
    2019.03 – 2026.02
    Dissertation: Systems-Level Dissection of Methanol Adaptation in Methylorubrum extorquens. Three-axis integration: 8-strain pan-genome comparison defining the AM1 (plasmid-rich) vs. streamlined PA1 divergence; AM1 wild-type ~800-generation ALE identifying metY (F36L/S383L) and kefB adaptive variants; engineered PA1 Δfdh234 ALE converging on the metY-1 Y57D substitution, with OAHS substrate-specificity rewiring proposed as a primary adaptive lever over catabolic flux optimization.
  • B.S., Genetic Engineering
    Kyung Hee University
    2011.03 – 2017.02

Experience

  • Postdoctoral Researcher
    KRIBB, Center for Synthetic Biology
    C1 team led by Hyewon Lee, Ph.D.
    2026.03 – present
    Methanotroph strain engineering, multi-omics pipelines, agentic tooling for the C1 team.
  • Graduate Researcher
    UNIST, Department of Chemical Engineering
    Systems Biology and Machine Learning Lab (Donghyuk Kim)
    2019.03 – 2026.02
    Methylotroph ALE, pan-genome and DEG analysis, bacteriophage and plant-pathogen comparative genomics.

Skills

Wet lab
  • Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE)
  • Methylotroph and methanotroph cultivation
  • Allelic exchange and mutation reconstruction
  • Growth phenotyping
  • RNA-seq library prep
Omics and modeling
  • Whole-genome sequencing analysis
  • Pan-genome comparative analysis
  • RNA-seq and DEG analysis
  • AlphaFold3 structure-function interpretation
  • COBRApy genome-scale metabolic modeling
Engineering
  • Python and R omics pipelines
  • Visualization automation
  • Claude Code agent workflows for synthetic biology
  • GitHub Actions CI and cron jobs
  • TypeScript / Astro for research tooling