Itaru Hamachi, Kyoto University, Japan
Itaru Hamachi obtained PhD in Kyoto University in 1988. He immediately became an assistant professor at Kyushu University, and then promoted to associate professor (1992), a full professor there in 2001. He moved back to Kyoto University in 2005. He was a CREST investigator of two different projects for 10 years and now ERATO research director on Molecular technology for neuroscience, all of which are supported by JST.
Mi Hee Lim, KAIST, South Korea
Mi Hee Lim received her BS in Chemistry from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea, in 1999 and her MSc in 2001 under the direction of Professor Wonwoo Nam. In 2002, she moved to MIT where she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Professor Stephen J. Lippard. She then pursued her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Jacqueline K. Barton at Caltech. In 2008, she began her independent career as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Research Assistant Professor in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. In 2013, Mi Hee moved to the Ulsan National University of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, Korea. In 2018, Mi Hee joined the Department of Chemistry at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea.
Her research interests lie in bioinorganic chemistry, especially focusing on identifying how metal-involved biological networks are linked to dementia, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and establishing new directions for developing chemical reagents as tools, diagnostics, and therapeutics for such diseases. Mi Hee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received numerous awards including the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC) Early Career Award (2018), the Award for "30 Young Scientists of Korea" to Lead Basic Science Research for the Next 30 Years (2016), the Korean Chemical Society (KCS)-Wiley Young Scientist Award (2015), NSF CAREER Award (2013), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2012). Mi Hee is on the Editorial Advisory board for Chemical Science, Chemical Communications, Chem, and Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry.