UCF’s Kyu Young Han Receives NIH Grants

Kyu Young Han, assistant professor in the University of Central Florida (UCF) College of Optics and Photonics, has been awarded two grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The first is a Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award for early-stage investigator. Han, the first faculty member at UCF to receive the grant, will pursue a bioengineering tool and imaging system to image multiple proteins in a single cell under a superresolution microscope. Current techniques for this task can take weeks to image fewer than 20 target proteins. Han expects to be able to accomplish this with nanoscale resolution in 24 hours. He will be working with two of his graduate students and collaborating with researchers from Rutgers University and the University of Illinois.

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics professor Kyu Young Han has been awarded two grants from the National Institutes of Health. Courtesy of UCF.

The second grant is part of the 4D Nucleome Program. It supports a team, including Han, that is building a microscope to be used by researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Bar-Ilan University in Israel to map proteins and genes and observe their dynamics in the fourth dimension.

Before joining UCF, Han worked at the Max Planck Institute in Germany where he studied superresolution fluorescence imaging. His postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on designing new optical tools for biological applications, such as studying DNA-protein interactions, imaging RNA in live cells, and revealing nuclear structure in mammalian cells. He holds one patent, which was commercialized by Leica Microsystems.