Tae Hoon Kim bio
From Genome@Yale
Tae is an Assistant Professor of Genetics at Yale University. He grew up in Seoul, Los Angeles, and Fresno. While in high school, he built a molecular biology lab in a backroom of his chemistry class and studied salt tolerance in moderately halophilic bacteria, Vibrio costicola. He received his B.A. in Biology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His undergraduate training included evolution, ecology, population genetics, genetics and some molecular biology. During years at Reed, he also worked at Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. as a research intern studying molecular evolution with Elizabeth Zimmer and Carol Bult. He also spent a summer as a research intern at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, studying 3D cellular movements of Dictyostelium discoideum using optical sectioning deconvolution microscopy. For his undergraduate thesis, he analyzed programmed cell death in Arabidopsis thaliana with Susan Lolle. He joined Tom Maniatis' laboratory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts for his Ph.D. study. He studied the protein-DNA assembly responsible for activating the human interferon beta gene - a large complex of transcription factors on the enhancer DNA known as the enhanceosome. He characterized the assembly mechanism of the enhanceosome and analyzed its structure using atomic force and electron microscopy. In 1999 with the impending release of the human genome draft sequence, he began optimizing the ChIP-chip protocol for human cells and designed several versions of genome tiling arrays for the type I interferon locus. In 2001, he helped Sean Megason found Homunculus Biosystems, Inc. After receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2002, he joined the lab of Bing Ren at Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in San Diego, California to develop and extend the ChIP-chip method for the human genome that he started in Tom Maniatis' lab. He joined the faculty of Genetics at the end of 2006. His current interests include insulators and enhancers that are critical for tumorigenesis.
