Myun Ki Han

Myun Ki Han, Ph.D. joined the Akonni Biosystems Board in 2019. He is currently the Executive Director of the Korea – U.S. Science Cooperation Center (KUSCO), and the Director General of the Korea Innovation Center (KIC). He received his Bachelors of Arts degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California San Diego, in La Jolla, CA in 1982. He then continued his education at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, earning his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics in 1988. He was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University Medical Center. He has also held multiple positions in industry. He began as a Staff Fellow in the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the NHLBI. Later he was a member of the Advisory Committee of the Global AIDS and Cancer Foundation, then the Director of Kwang Dong Pharmaceutical Research Laboratories. More recently, he was the President and CEO of Excimus Biotech, and on the Board of Directors of KUSCO as the Chairman of the Finance Committee. In addition to his current leadership roles at KUSCO and KIC, he is also the Managing Director of JoEn Enterprise LLC. Dr. Han has a long history of significant contributions to the scientific community in his work on a wide variety of fluorescence techniques to study reaction kinetics, subunit interactions, reversible DNA strand separation, and structural analysis. His early career work involved the reaction kinetics of the bacterial phosphotransferase system and a thorough study of HIV-1 processing activities. Dr. Han also researched and patented fluorescent assays for DNA cleavage, including a fluorescence study on reversible strand separation. He developed the patented CataCleave cyclic probe technology which can detect SNPs, insertions, and deletions; identify target DNA through fluorescent amplification; and provide real-time monitoring of both isothermal and temperature-cycling nucleic amplification methods. Dr. Han is an experienced professional with thorough understanding of multiple areas of fluorescent biochemistry, DNA analysis, and protein structure research.