Faculty

  • Cheol-Min Ghim (김철민)

  • Associate Professor
  • Theoretical Biophysics; Complex Systems
  • Current Research Interests

    The Ghim Lab seeks to find the “design” principles behind the complex networks for biological information processing. Encompassing cellular metabolism, regulation of gene expression, cell-to-cell communication, and social and ecological interactions among individuals. the current focus of research is on

    • Noisein gene expression and metabolism [stochastic biochemistry]
    • Resource allocation for coordinated metabolism[cell economy]
    • Causal reconstruction biological information transfer[causal inference]
    • Human microbiome[microbial ecology and sociology]

    The aim from biology side is to rationalize the robustness of biological networks in the light of form-function duality. The other side of the coin is an effort to restore the precision and accuracy of biochemical control in e.g. syntheticbiology or metabolic engineering up to its silicon-based counterpart. Both of these objectives are closely linked to the fundamental problems of equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of complex systems. Information theory and statistical mechanics are a major tool toward this end but the crux is still the rigorous biological realism.

  • Biographical Sketch
    • B.S. in Physics (1992),Seoul National University
    • Ph.D. in Physics (2003), Seoul National University
      [Thesis: “Selected Problems in Statistical Mechanics of Biological Membranes”]
    • Postdoctoral researcher, Center for Theoretical Physics, Seoul Nat’l Univ (2003-2004)
    • Postdoctoral researcher, Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, UC San Diego (2004-2006)
    • Postdoctoral research staff, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2006-2009)
    • Professor in Department of Physics and School of Life Sciences, UNIST (2009-present)
  • Selected Publications
    • H. Yang, J. Jang, C.-M. Ghim. Effects of zygosity on stochastic gene expression of diploid cells, J. Kor. Phys. Soc.74: 312 (2019).
    • H.Im, C.-M. Ghim, R. J. Mitchell. Serum albumin and osmolality inhibit Bdellovibriobacteriovorus predation in human serum,Sci. Rep. 7: 5896 (2017).
    • K. Sung, J. Jang, K. S. Lee, C.-M. Ghim, J. K. Choi. Selected heterozygosity at cis-regulatory sequences increases the expression homogeneity of a cell population in humans,Genome Biol. 17: 164 (2016).
    • H. Im, D. Kim, C.-M. Ghim. R. J. Mitchell. Shedding light on microbial predator–prey population dynamics using a quantitative bioluminescence assay,Microb.Ecol.67, 167 (2014).
    • P. Vinuselvi, M. K. Kim, S. K. Lee, C.-M. Ghim. Rewiring carbon catabolite repression for microbial cell factory, BMB Reports 45, 59 (2012).
    • C.-M. Ghim, T. Kim, R. J. Mitchell, S. K. Lee. Synthetic biology for biofuels: Building designer microbes from the scratch, Biotech. Bioproc. Eng. 15, 11 (2010).
    • C.-M. Ghim, E. Almaas. Two-component genetic switch as a synthetic module with tunable stability, Phys. Rev. Lett.103, 028101 (2009).
    • C. S. Wylie, C.-M. Ghim, D. Kessler, H. Levine,The fixation probability of rare mutators in finite asexual populations, Genetics181, 1595 (2009).