Hee-Sun was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Although she was inspired to pursue chemistry through frequent visits to her father’s polymer chemistry laboratory growing up, her initial interest leaned more toward theory. While attending Seoul National University, she worked in a computational biology and biomolecular engineering lab led by Chaok Seok, where they developed methods to predict the 3D structure of novel proteins. This experience sparked her passion for working at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering. Immediately after graduating, she moved to Cambridge, MA, to pursue graduate studies in physical chemistry at MIT as a Samsung and KASF fellow. Under the guidance of Prof. Moungi G. Bawendi, she designed and synthesized quantum dot (QD)-based imaging probes and established a QD-based phenotypic, intravital cytometric imaging platform. Using this platform, she imaged live cells in wild-type mice at single-cell resolution and probed their native extracellular environments for the first time. While in vivo imaging studies characterize the phenotype of cells and their extracellular environments, a fundamental understanding of cellular behavior requires molecular profiling. After earning her PhD from MIT, she joined the lab of David A. Weitz at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow, where she developed droplet-based microfluidic platforms for high-throughput sequencing of single cells and viruses. In 2017, she joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, where she leverages her expertise in microfluidics, materials chemistry, bioimaging, and genomics to invent new technologies that uncover the fundamental rules governing the ensemble behavior of native biological systems.
Outside the lab, she enjoys hiking, skiing, and playing the piano.