Dong-Myung Kim is a professor at Chungnam National University, Korea, specializing in cell-free synthetic biology. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from Seoul National University, completing his doctorate in 1996. Following his Ph.D., he conducted postdoctoral research at Genentech and Stanford University in the United States before joining Roche Diagnostics, where he served as a principal scientist and later as a research director.
In 2003, Dr. Kim returned to Korea to continue his academic career at Chungnam National University, where his research has been dedicated to advancing cell-free synthetic biology. His work focuses on developing biomanufacturing platforms and biosensor systems, leveraging cell-free technologies to expand the frontiers of biotechnology.
Dr. Kim is currently serving as the president of the Korean Society for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (KSBB), contributing to the advancement of the field both nationally and internationally.

Jong Wook Hong is Professor of Digital & Medical Engineering, Bionanoengineering and Bionanotechnology at Hanyang University, Korea. He served as a tenured faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Auburn University. He has published in journals including Science and Nature Biotechnology. Hong received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in Chemical Engineering and was a postdoctoral scholar at Thomas J. Whatson Laboratories of Applied Physics, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena. Hong was a Japanese government scholar and a junior research associate at the University of Tokyo and the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Japan, respectively. As you can track with his recent research, providing robust and reliable unit operation of intact separation of extracellular vesicles (EVs) or exosomes without any physical damages and chemical contaminations is one of his current interests.

Ki Soo Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at Konkuk University. He received his Ph.D. from KAIST and completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His research interests include nucleic acid bioengineering, exosome analysis platforms, nano-biotechnology for biomedical sensing, and point-of-care diagnostic systems.

Han Min Woo is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Biotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), South Korea, a position he has held since 2016. He has also been a Director at SKy Biofoundry since 2019. Prior to joining SKKU, he served as a Senior Scientist at the Clean Energy Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea (2011-2016). He earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Korea University (2004), his master’s degree from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon (2006), and his Ph.D. from the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf (HHU), Germany (2010). His postdoctoral studies were conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) (2011).
Dr. Woo’s research focuses on metabolic engineering and synthetic biology of Corynebacteria and Cyanobacteria, with a significant emphasis on the development of CRISPR genetic tools for strain engineering. Recently, he established the SKy Biofoundry as part of the Global Biofoundry Alliance, where he developed an automated workflow for strain engineering. As of July 2024, he has published over 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles, holds 30 registered patents, and has given over 79 scientific presentations at international conferences and invited seminars. He has received several accolades, including the Young Scientist Award from the International Metabolic Engineering Society (IMES) in 2012 and the Daesong Corp. Award from the Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology.

Hyun Gyu Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at Inha University, Korea. He earned both his Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). During his Ph.D., he applied synthetic biology to develop microbial processes, utilizing single or multi-strain systems for the efficient conversion of non-conventional feedstocks such as glycerol, acetate, and marine biomass sugars. Following his Ph.D., he completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he focused on multi-omics approaches, including laboratory evolution and machine learning-guided large-scale transcriptome analyses. Dr. Lim returned to Korea in early 2023 to join Inha University. His lab focuses on integrating systems biology and synthetic biology to develop intelligent microbial systems, primarily for biorefinery applications.

Shin Sik Choi received his PhD from Seoul National University, Korea and performed postdoctoral research in University of California Santa Barbara, USA. He has been working in Myongji University, Korea as a professor for 16 years and recently founded the startup company, “elegslab”, with two business models: microbime therapeutics and AI-Biochip-CRO. The microbiome therapeutics targeting Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases were developed through the elegslab’s cutting-edge drug discovery solutions. The AI-Biochip-CRO helps clients discover novel drug candidates from 1,000-100,000 libraries through elegslab’s in vivo screening system and conduct toxicity/efficacy non-clinical test using a fantastic animal testing alternative model organism, C. elegans.

Yuan-Pang Hsieh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of low-input, high-throughput microfluidic technologies for profiling epigenetic regulation, exosomes, and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in clinical cancer samples, with the aim of advancing precision medicine applications.

Kuan Shiong Khoo is currently serving as an Assistant Professor in Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Yuan Ze University, Taiwan, since September 2022. His research focuses on the microalgae biotechnology, covering upstream and downstream processing of bioactive compounds such as proteins, lipids and carotenoids (i.e. astaxanthin, lutein and fucoxanthin) as value-added bioproducts using various extraction technologies such as liquid biphasic system, assisted-liquid biphasic system and ionic liquids technologies. His current research focuses on upcycling food waste as an alternative fermentation medium for the cultivation of microalgae. His research interest also involves in microalgae-bacteria consortium for wastewater bioremediation including heavy metal, and volatile organic compound, algae-based biofuels, integration of Internet-of-things (IoT) for real time monitoring and machine learning prediction with microalgae biotechnology.