Yong-Su Jin is a professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research is centered on metabolic engineering of microorganisms to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable biomass. Jin aims to identify, characterize, and engineer beneficial genetic strands to make the production of target products, such as biofuels, more efficient. He will bring a metabolic engineering perspective to RIPE. Systems-level genetic perturbations and fine control of expression levels will be necessary to maximize the desired phenotypes in plants. He will evaluate designed metabolic pathways using photosynthetic algae as a model.

Yong-Su earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Seoul National University in Korea before going on to earn his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Communications, eLife, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At Illinois, he is a faculty member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB); faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); and has received the Excellence in Research Award from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.