Minkyu Kim

• Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
• Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Minkyu Kim is an assistant professor in the department of materials science and engineering and the department of biomedical engineering. He is a faculty member in the BIO5 Institute. Kim earned his BS degree in mechanical engineering from Kyung Hee University (Korea). He moved to the U.S. for his graduate work and received an MS in biomedical engineering and a PhD in mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke University, where he primarily worked on biopolymer mechanics at single-molecule level. He was a postdoc in the bioinspired and bio-functional polymers group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked on the development of biopolymer materials for defense applications.

The goal of the Kim Research Group is to develop novel naturally-derived and biologically-derived biopolymers to construct diverse functional soft materials, such as cell mechanics-mimetic materials, filtering materials, antimicrobial materials, and hypo-immunogenic coatings, to mitigates issues in healthcare, environmental safety and national defense.