5/22/2026 Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Kim’s CAREER project ‘Decoding active and passive mechanisms driving bacterial chromosome dynamics,’ seeks to establish a genome-scale understanding of how bacterial chromosomes move inside living cells and to uncover the physical principles governing their dynamics.
Written by Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Illinois Physics Professor Sangjin Kim has been selected for a 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding junior faculty who excel in both research and teaching and who demonstrate the potential to become lifetime leaders in their respective fields.
Kim is a biological physicist whose research investigates how living cells are organized at the most fundamental physical level. Her group studies the complex dynamics of cells at whole-cell to molecular scales, from large molecular complexes such as chromosomes down to the workings of individual molecules. By combining experimental and computational approaches, her lab examines chromosome dynamics, gene expression, and the biophysical properties of the cytoplasm.
Kim’s CAREER project, titled “Decoding active and passive mechanisms driving bacterial chromosome dynamics,” seeks to establish a genome-scale understanding of how bacterial chromosomes move inside living cells and to uncover the physical principles governing their dynamics. Chromosomes carry the genetic instructions that allow cells to grow, respond to their environment, and pass information to future generations, but much less is known about how different regions of chromosomes move and interact within living systems.
“When we think about chromosomes, we often first think of DNA sequence—the blueprint of life,” said Kim. “But chromosomes are not static strings of genetic code. Inside cells, they are folded, packed, and constantly reorganized as cells grow and divide. These movements highlight chromosomes’ unique dynamic nature, a property that distinguishes them from other biomolecules and is a signature of living matter! Our goal is to understand the physical principles that make this dynamic behavior possible.”
The project will combine high-resolution single-molecule tracking, MINFLUX super-resolution microscopy, quantitative polymer-physics modeling, and in vitro reconstitution experiments to study chromosome dynamics in the bacterium Escherichia coli. Kim’s group will measure the motion of many genomic loci at fast timescales to build a high-resolution atlas of chromosome motion and investigate how chromosome organization, cellular activity, and physical constraints shape these dynamics.
The CAREER project builds on several major themes of Kim’s research program: it integrates physics, biology, and computational modeling to connect chromosome dynamics, chromosome structure, and genome function. The resulting experimental and computational tools may help establish new approaches for understanding genome regulation and could inform future biotechnology applications, including efforts to engineer synthetic gene-expression systems.
In addition to its research goals, the project includes education and outreach activities designed to train students in quantitative biophysics, broaden access to research experiences, and disseminate experimental protocols and analysis tools. The project will also highlight the contributions of physicists to biology and medicine, including Nobel laureate and Illinois Physics alumna Rosalyn Yalow.
Kim received a B.S. in chemistry from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2004 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 2010. Under the supervision of X. Sunney Xie, her doctoral research on single-molecule biophysics uncovered “DNA allostery,” demonstrating that DNA-bound proteins can influence one another’s binding properties at a distance. She later conducted postdoctoral research under Christine Jacobs-Wagner at Yale University, studying the spatiotemporal regulation of transcription, translation, and mRNA degradation in bacterial cells using experimental and computational methods.
Before joining the faculty of Illinois Physics at in 2019, Kim developed expertise in single-molecule biophysics, microbiology, and computational modeling. She is a recipient of several honors, including a Searle Scholar award, an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences, and a University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study Fellowship.