Hyun YoukAssociate ProfessorDepartment of Systems Biology UMass Chan Medical School hyun.youk@umassmed.edu cv (.pdf) 
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I'm an associate professor of systems biology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. My lab began in January 2015 at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in Delft, the Netherlands. After nearly six years there, I moved to the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMass Med). My passion in life is understanding what it means to "live" and "die". Is death invevitable? If so, why is that? If not, what are we and all other organisms doing wrong? In our attempt to address these questions, our lab seeks quantitative principles that dictate the dynamics of cellular systems. These systems include cell-signalling circuits, populations of interacting cells, and organisms that appear to be "dead" but are, in fact, merely at the nexus of life and death (e.g., dormant yeast spores). Just as the central dogma of molecular biology ties together the fantastically wide range of organisms, I believe that there is a core set of quantitative principles -yet to be fully revealed - that unify disparate living systems and their behaviors. Such principles will likely explain, in a rigorous quantitative framework, what it means for a network of molecules be "living". My initial training in physics gives me hope that we will ultimately discover a core set of quantitative rules and principles that rigorously explain what a state of "living" means and thus what being "dead" means. Science has succeeded in comprehending so many non-living systems such as galaxies and solid-state systems under one quantitative framework. Yet the progress in quantitatively understanding living systems has lagged behind. I believe that this is due to a conceptual roadblock - many different types of interactions occur inside living cells. This is unlike solid-state systems such as magnets and metals that contain many interactions but of just a few types. My group tackles these conceptual challenges by performing experiments and building models and theoretical frameworks. Interview with Communications Biology for LGBTQ+ STEM Day 2021, (November 2021) "Three questions" - EUSynBioS (May 2018) Self introduction in Kavli-Delft Newsletter (October 2014) (Pg. 9) |