Chi-Ju Kim's Biography

Chi-Ju Kim, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Chi-Ju Kim is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Kenneth Pienta-Sarah Amend laboratory at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He comes to the field of cancer biology accompanied by many biomedical engineering skills gained in the development of a microfluidic device for liquid biopsy applications (extracellular vesicles (EVs), cell-free DNA (cfDNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and platelets). He is committed to pursuing a career in academic research to develop microfluidic systems for translational biomedical sciences, especially in understanding and discovering the critical mechanism leading to lethal cancer. The ultimate career goal is to cure cancer and to improve cancer patients’ lives through the realization of personalized precision medicine. He has already made major contributions to the improvement of disease treatment management, particularly for cancer, including: (i) developing fully automated isolation methods of cfDNA, EVs, and platelets from whole blood, (ii) developing fully automated platelet function tests. Currently, his research involves investigating the implication of nucleus morphology in the polyaneuploid cancer cell (PACC) state on therapeutic recurrence and on developing novel microfluidic systems to define the critical role of EVs in tumor microenvironments and how they contribute to tumorigenesis. The combination of his Ph.D. research in biomedical engineering with the training in cancer biology gained during his postdoctoral fellowship uniquely suits him to build his own research field, stipulated as translational biomedical research, by both proposing a novel model of cancer biology and developing a realizable microfluidic system to elucidate mechanisms of metastasis and therapeutic resistance.