SPEAKERS

Youngwan Kim is the consul general for the Republic of Korea Consulate in Los Angeles. Kim is a career diplomat who joined the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Korea in 1993. He has worked at various ministries of the Korean Government, including the Foreign Ministry, the Unification Ministry and the Office for Government Policy Coordination in the Prime Minister’s Office. Immediately prior to his current post as consul general in LA, he served as director-general for national security and foreign policy in the prime minister’s office. His most recent foreign post was as a member of the Panel of Experts, UN Security Council Sanctions Committee at the United Nations headquarters New York. His other foreign posts include Washington D.C., Beijing and Baghdad.

Kim graduated from Yonsei University in 1992 and received a master’s degree from the University of Virginia in 2001. 

James “Jamie” Bock is a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at California Institute of Technology. He is currently the principal investigator of SPHEREx, a mission selected by NASA in February 2019 as a Medium Explorer designed to map the entire sky in near-infrared spectroscopy. His research focuses on infrared/millimeter-wave detectors and instrumentation, cosmic microwave background anisotropy and polarization, extragalactic background measurements and line intensity mapping.

Bock obtained his bachelor’s of science degree in physics and mathematics from Duke University and his master’s of arts and doctorate in physics from UC Berkeley. Since graduating, he has worked as both a faculty member at Caltech and a researcher at JPL.

Hillson earned his bachelor’s degree in physics at Rice University and his doctorate in biophysics at Harvard Medical School. As lead principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Agile BioFoundry, Hillson leads an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers distributed across seven DOE National Labs with the goal of creating sustainable, scalable biomanufacturing processes for crucial fuels and chemicals. Hillson also contributes to the Joint Genome Institute and Joint Bioenergy Institute.

Hong received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994) and his master’s and doctorate in mechanical engineering from Purdue University (1999, 2002). He is also a serious gourmet chef as well as a magician who performs at annual charity events and lectures on the science behind magic.

Miryung Kim is a professor and vice chair of graduate studies in the Computer Science Department at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. She has taken a leadership role in defining the emerging area of software engineering with, and for, AI. Her current research focuses on developer tools for big data systems and heterogeneous computing. She is a pioneer in the field of mining software repositories, leveraging AI-driven insights for developer productivity. Her group created automated testing and debugging for Apache Spark. She conducted the largest scale study of data scientists. Her group’s Java bytecode debloating JDebloat made a tech transfer impact to the U.S. Navy.

Kim received her bachelor’s degree from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology and a master’s degree and doctorate from University of Washington under the supervision of David Notkin. She was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, before moving to UCLA as an associate professor in 2014 and being promoted to full professor in 2019. She has spent time as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research and is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services.

Park received his bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and bioengineering from UC San Diego and master’s and doctorate in chemical engineering from Princeton University. His research accomplishments include the conversion of carbon dioxide into biofuels and specialty chemicals derived from non-natural products by engineering microbial metabolism. His recent awards include National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award and Hellman Fellowship. Before joining UCLA, he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. 

Yoonjin Won is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering. Her overarching research goal as leader of the Won Lab is to gain fundamental insights into nanoscale interfacial and transport physics. She aims to bring transformational efficiency enhancements to energy harvesting, manufacturing processes, and electronics cooling by manipulating liquid-solid-vapor interactions and transport phenomena across multiple distance and time scales. 

Won earned her bachelor’s of science and bachelor’s of business administration degrees at Seoul National University and her master’s and doctorate in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Won was recognized with an National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018 and has also received several other early career awards and numerous best paper and poster awards.