Taekjip Ha

Taekjip Ha (born February 20, 1968, Seoul, South Korea) is a South Korean-born American biophysicist who is currently a Gutgsell Professor of Physics,^[5] at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is the principal investigator of Single Molecule Nanometry group. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.^[6][7]

Education

He received a B.S. degree in physics at Seoul National University in 1990, and joined the physics department at University of California, Berkeley where he began to study atomic physics in the lab of Raymond Jeanloz in Berkeley’s geophysics department and worked on a project to place nitrogen and carbon under very high pressures, with the goal to create a material harder than diamonds and in between he had to take a temporary leave of absence from Berkeley to South Korea for a year to fulfill South Korea’s military service requirements. Upon his return, Ha changed his research interests and joined the lab of Daniel Chemla, a prominent scientist known for his studies of quantum optics of semiconductors. Soon after joining Chemla’s group, Ha began working closely with scientist Shimon Weiss to build a near-field scanning optical microscope, a machine equipped with a small aperture and a short-pulse laser able to measure a material's properties with high time and spatial resolution. He subsequently received both his M.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley and continued to do postdoctoral research there and later at Stanford University with advisor Steven Chu, before joining the University of Illinois in 2000 as assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology.^[8]

Research

Taekjip Ha uses sophisticated physical techniques to manipulate and visualize the movements of single molecules^[9][10][11] to understand basic biological processes involving DNA^[12] and other molecules.^[10][13] He applies the use of single-molecule techniques^[14][15] and has pioneered the technique^[16][17][18] in studying biological system usually supported by nano-mechanical tools such as optical tweezers.^[19][20] He has been cited more than 17000 times and his current H index is 63.^[21]

See also

• James D. Watson
• Vijay Pande
• Steven Block
• Arthur Ashkin
• Julio M. Fernandez
• Alan Fersht
• Stephen D. Levene
• W. E. Moerner
• Paul Lauterbur
• List of biophysicists

References