Biography
Kyu Young Han received his BS and PhD in Chemistry from Seoul National University, Korea in 2004 and 2010. During his PhD, he worked at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany where he achieved ultimate resolution of optical microscopy using stimulated emission depletion (STED) and ground state depletion (GSD) microscopy, and developed affordable time-gated STED. Since 2011, he has been working as a postdoc researcher at the University of Illinois, focusing on designing new optical tools for biological applications such as studying DNA-protein interactions, RNA imaging in live-cells and revealing nuclear structure in mammalian cells. His patent on STED microscopy was commercialized by Leica Microsystems.
Awards & Honors
- 2020 NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA)
Research Group
We are interested in the development and applications of novel optical tools such as fluorescence nanoscopy (super-resolution imaging) and label-free single molecule imaging to study essential problems in biology and neuroscience.
Research Scientists
Graduate Students
Publications
C.H. Weng, K.Y. Han "Photobleaching analysis of fluorescent proteins in two-photon microscopy at high repetition rates" Optics Communications, 574, 131059 (2025)
Abdullah Husain, S Yerolatsitis, R Amezcua-Correa, KY Han "Photonic lantern TIRF microscopy for highly efficient, uniform, artifact-free imaging" Optics Express, 32, 37046-37058 (2024)
G. Lukinavicius, J. Alvelid, R. Gerasimaite, C. Rodilla-Ramirez, V.T. Nguyen, G. Vicidomini, F. Bottanelli, K.Y. Han, I. Testa "Stimulated emission depletion microscopy" Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 4, 56 (2024)
L.M. Wang, J. Kim & K.Y. Han "Highly sensitive volumetric single-molecule imaging" Nanophotonics, 13 (20), 3805–3814 (2024)
S. Basu, M. Song, L. Adams, G. Je, S. Guhathakurta, J. Jiang, N. Boparai, W. Dai, F. Cardozo-Pelaez, S.A. Tatulian, K.Y. Han, J. Elliott, J. Baum, D.W. Dicson, P.J. McLean, Y.S. Kim "Transcriptional mutagenesis of a-synuclein caused by DNA oxidation in Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis" Acta Neuropathologica, 146, 685-705 (2023)
V. Ebrahimi, T. Stephan, J. Kim, P. Carravilla, C. Eggeling, S. Jakobs, K.Y. Han "Deep learning enables fast, gentle STED microscopy " Communications Biology 6, 674 (2023)
K. Amar, S. Saha, A. Debnath, C.H. Weng, A. Roy, K.Y. Han, F Chowdhury "Reduced cell-ECM interactions in the EpiSC colony center cause heterogeneous differentiation" Cells, 12(2), 326 (2023)
V. Ebrahimi, J. Tang and K.Y. Han "Incoherent superposition of polychromatic light enables single-shot nondiffracting light-sheet microscopy" Optics Express 29(20), 32691-32699 (2021)
J. Ren and K.Y. Han "2.5D microscopy with polarization independent SLM for enhanced detection efficiency and aberration correction" Optics Express, 29(17), 27530-27541 (2021)
J. Ren and K.Y. Han "2.5D microscopy: Fast, high-throughput imaging via volumetric projection for quantitative subcellular analysis" ACS Photonics, 8(3), 933-942 (2021)
C.H. Weng, J. Tang and K.Y. Han "Optimizing the performance of multiline-scanning confocal microscopy" Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 54(10), A. 105401 (2021)
Jialei Tang and K.Y. Han "Instantaneous non-diffracting light-sheet generation by controlling spatial coherence" Optics Communications, 474, 126154 (2020)
Benjamin Croop, J. Tang and K.Y. Han "Single-shot, shadowless total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy via annular fiber bundle" Optics Letters 45(23), 6470-6473 (2020)
Jialei Tang*, Jinhan Ren* & KY Han "Fluorescence imaging with tailored light" Nanophotonics, 8(12), 2111–2128 (2019)
J. Tang and KY Han "Low-photobleaching line-scanning confocal microscopy using dual inclined beams" Journal of Biophotonics 12(10), e201900075 (2019)
J.C. Lee, Y. Ma, K.Y. Han, and T. Ha "Accurate background subtraction in STED nanoscopy by polarization switching" ACS Photonics 6(7), 1789-1797 (2019)
Benjamin Croop, C. Zhang, Y. Lim, R.M. Gelfand & K.Y. Han "Recent advancement of light-based single-molecule approaches for studying biomolecules (Invited Review)" Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-System Biology and Medicine, 11(4), e1445 (2019)
J. Tang, C.H. Weng, J.B. Oleske, and K.Y. Han "A guide to build a highly inclined swept tile microscope for extended field-of-view single-molecule imaging" JoVE - Journal of Visualized Experiments, 146, e59360 (2019)
J. Kim, K.Y. Han, N. Khanna, T. Ha, and A.S. Belmont "Nuclear speckle fusion via long-range directional motion regulates speckle morphology after transcriptional inhibition (journal cover)" Journal of Cell Science 132(8), jcs226563 (2019)
Benjamin Croop & K.Y. Han "Facile single-molecule pull-down assay for analysis of endogenous proteins" Physical Biology 16(3), 035002 (2019)
Alumni
PhD
Chun Hung Weng, Optics Ph.D., Fall 2023Vahid Ebrahimi, Optics Ph.D., Summer 2023
Benjamin Croop, Optics Ph.D., Summer 2021
Jinhan Ren, Optics Ph.D., Summer 2021
Chenyi Zhang, Optics Ph.D., Spring 2021
Jialei Tang, Optics Ph.D., Spring 2020