Jung Hwan Kim, PhD

Biography

Dr. Jung Hwan Kim received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Biomedical Engineering field) at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL in 2010. He was then trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and a research associate at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Kim joined the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at UTHealth Houston Medical School in 2023 as Associate Professor. Previously, He served as Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine for six years.

Dr. Kim has diverse experiences from traditional engineering to medical science. Early into his research career, he focused on traditional engineering research related to fluid mechanics and heat/mass transport to improve performance of air conditioning systems and rocket propulsion cooling systems. During his Ph.D. period, Dr. Kim started working on biomedical engineering field. For his Ph.D. dissertation, his researched developing a novel 3D computational model with MR Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) to predicts the dynamic evolution of infusate delivered by Convection enhanced delivery (CED) for overcoming the blood brain barrier (BBB) and treating diseases of the central nervous system. After graduation, he broadened his knowledge to human neuroimaging, and neurophysiology. He also began establishing his MR physics background with Siemens MR pulse sequence programming courses and developed his expertise in high resolution human neuroimaging using various MR scanners (human 3T, 7T and 9.4T).

His research interests is human neuroimaging focusing on understanding of neurovascular and neurometabolic coupling using functional MRI and computational modeling, which ultimately extends its use to investigate brain pathology. Dr. Kim explores the use of mathematical modeling with fMRI data to understand human brain function and underlying physiology such as cerebral blood flow (CBF) and oxygen metabolism (CMRO2). He extends these to characterize the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response in various human regions including subcortical nuclei. He also expands his research interests to understand the underlying physiology of the negative BOLD response (NBR) and its spatiotemporal linearity quantifying neural suppression in the human brain, which can dramatically expand the utility of fMRI to understand normal human brain functions.

Dr. Kim has received multiple research grants (K25, R01 and R56) from various NIH institutes (e.g., NHLBI, NINDS and NIA) and the German government for international collaboration serving as a guest scientist at Max Plank Institute in Tubingen, Germany. He has been mentoring over 30 of high school students, undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculties and early career professionals during his career. He also served as an NIH study section reviewer (study section EITN and ZRG1 IMST-L) in 2020, 2022 and 2023. He served as an ad hoc reviewer for PNAS, Neuroimage, Translational Stroke Research, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, and Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization. He is currently serving as a review editor of Frontier in Neuroscience – brain imaging methods.