Sangjin Kim
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Biography
Professor Kim studied chemistry as an undergraduate student in Seoul National University in South Korea and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010 under the supervision of X. Sunney Xie. Her thesis research on single molecule biophysics uncovered "DNA allostery," by which DNA-bound proteins can affect each other's DNA binding properties at a distance (Science, 2013). To study how single molecules function inside cells, Professor Kim switched her research area to microbiology and conducted her postdoctoral research in Christine Jacobs-Wagner's lab at Yale University. She studied spatio-temporal regulation of transcription, translation, and mRNA degradation in bacterial cells using both experimental and computational approaches. She joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in January, 2019 and is excited to combine her expertise in single molecule biophysics, microbiology and computational modeling to study the complexity of living cells at the single-molecule and single-cell levels.
Selected Articles in Journals
- Kim S, Zhang Y, Ju X, Hassan A, Wang Y-H, Liu S, and Kim S. (2026) "Spatial and genetic constraints govern transcription-translation coupling and mRNA degradation in bacteria" Nat Microbiol doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02374-8
- Ghosal, A., Wang, Y.-H., Nguyen, N., Troyer, L., Kim, S. (2025). "Practical considerations for accurate estimation of diffusion parameters from single-particle tracking in living cells." J. Chem. Phys. 163: 134202.
- Troyer, L., Wang, Y.-H., Shobhna, Kim, S., Woo, J., Tajkhorshid, E., Kim, S. (2025) "Roles of the membrane-binding motif and the C-terminal domain of RNase E in localization and diffusion in E. coli" eLife 14:RP105062
- Chatterjee, P., Goldenfeld, N., Kim, S. (2021) "DNA Supercoiling Drives a Transition between Collective Modes of Gene Synthesis" Phys. Rev. Lett. 127:218101.
Research Honors
- NSF CAREER award (2026)
- University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellow (2022-2023)
- Kavli Fellow, National Academy of Sciences (2022)
- NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (2021)
- Searle Scholar, Kinship Foundation of Chicago (2020)
Recent Courses Taught
- PHYS 101 - College Physics: Mech & Heat
- PHYS 211 - University Physics: Mechanics
- PHYS 407 - Exp Bio Physics
- PHYS 498 EBP - Special Topics in Physics