Yong-Su Jin, Ph.D.

Dr. Yong-Su Jin is pioneering the use of engineered microorganisms to deliver bioactive molecules and therapeutic proteins into the gut to prevent and treat gastrointestinal disease. He advances the use of engineered microorganisms for safe and sustainable production of value-added products from renewable biomass. He also optimizes genetic and metabolic processes within cells for enhanced production of target products while minimizing production of byproducts and waste.
More information: 
Metabolic engineering, which draws upon the key engineering principles of integration and quantification, is a platform technology that provides solutions to various biological problems in the context of systems and synthetic biology. In particular, Jin's lab is interested in developing and applying systematic and combinatorial methods for strain improvement for the production of fuels, chemicals, and nutraceuticals. Also, Jin would like to extend these methods for studying fundamental biology problems, such as aging and stress response. The overall goals of his research are (1) to develop useful/efficient computational and experimental tools for the dissection of complex metabolic networks in microbial cells, and (2) to create optimal strains for biotechnological processes using these developed tools.
Yong-Su earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Seoul National University in Korea before going on to earn his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Communications, eLife, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
Affiliations: 
Yong-Su Jin is a professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also a faculty member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), a faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and a member of the RIPE project.