Hee-Sun Han’s lab develops novel technologies integrating diverse chemical and physical principles to study intact, fully assembled biological systems with single cell/molecule resolution, at high throughput while retaining the spatial or environmental information of each cells in vivo. Han leverages advances in nanotechnology, materials chemistry, bio-imaging, and drop-based microfluidics to pioneer technologies for correlating single cell sequencing data with the structural, molecular and environmental characteristics of each cell in intact organs.
Han obtained her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the College of Natural Sciences at Seoul National University, Korea, where she graduated summa cum laude and Valedictorian in 2006. After college, she moved to Cambridge to pursue graduate work in Physical Chemistry at MIT as a Samsung and KASF fellow. Under the guidance of Prof. Moungi G. Bawendi, she designed and synthesized new quantum dot-based imaging probes and developed a multiplexed, phenotypic, intravital cytometric imaging platform. She then moved to Harvard to work with Prof. David A. Weitz as a postdoctoral fellow. At Harvard, she pioneered drop-based microfluidic platforms for high throughput sequencing of single viruses. She joined the University of Illinois faculty as the Mark A. Pytosh Scholar and Assistant Professor in Fall 2017.