Speakers’ Bio

Han Min Woo

Dr. Woo is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Biotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), South Korea. He has been the 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. As of July 2024, he has published over 88 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.

Jinhee Hur

Dr. Hur is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology in the Department of Food Science and Biotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University. She is the Director of Food Clinical Research Center and the Clinical and Nutritional Epidemiology Lab in the Department. She earned her BS and MS in Food and Nutritional Sciences from Ewha Womans’ University and worked at several Korean government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Hur received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with distinguished recognition as the only one inductee to both honor societies – Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Omega – out of 962 members in Class of 2019. She completed her postdoctoral training in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is still affiliated as a Research Collaborator. As a nutritional epidemiologist, Dr. Hur has been committed to elucidating early life or life course dietary and lifestyle risk factors for gastrointestinal malignancies. She has been published more than 20 papers in major medical and epidemiologic journals in the past 4 years. Her current research efforts focus on deciphering the etiology of obesity-related cancer in the young and the role of nutrition in chronic disease development.