Jin-Soo Kim's Biography

Jin-Soo Kim, Director/Associate Professor, Seoul National University

Jin-Soo Kim is an entrepreneur and chemist-turned-biologist. He graduated from Seoul National University in 1987 with a major in chemistry. He then earned a master’s degree in chemistry from Seoul National University in 1989 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. After postdoctoral training at Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he came back to Seoul in 1997 to serve as Principal Investigator at Samsung Biomedical Research Institute. He co-founded a biotechnology company, ToolGen, Inc., focused on zinc-finger technology and genome engineering in 1999, and served as CEO and CSO for the subsequent 6 years. He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National University in 2005. He now serves as Director of Center for Genome Engineering at Institute for Basic Science. He has published over 60 articles and filed 20 patent applications, mostly in the field of gene regulation and genome editing. He has been a member of Faculty of 1000 since May, 2013.