Jin-Soo KIM

Professor

A Korean scientist in genome editing, among the first to demonstrate CRISPR-Cas9 editing in eukaryotic cells in 2012. He is a professor at the KAIST Graduate School of Engineering Biology, where he directs the Genome Engineering Lab. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry at Seoul National University and a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, then worked as a research associate at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and MIT. He founded ToolGen in 1999 and led it as CEO until 2005, before joining the chemistry department at Seoul National University as a professor; in 2014 he founded the Center for Genome Engineering at the Institute for Basic Science and directed it until 2022. He has developed a range of genome editing tools, including Digenome-seq for detecting off-target sites and DddA-derived cytosine base editors for editing mitochondrial DNA. His publications have drawn more than 44,000 citations, with an h-index of 96.