Recent rising stars from the K-Lab
Dong-Yoon Kim was the first PhD student at K-Lab, and he graduated in 2022. His study on a neural circuit mechanism for mechanosensory feedback control of ingestion was published in Nature in 2020, and his work on the neural circuits underlying thermoregulatory behavior was published in Neuron in 2022. As a result of his work, he received numerous academic honors and distinctions, including the Best PhD Thesis Award, the AMOREPACIFIC Next Generation Researcher Award, and the Talent Award of Korea. He received a highly competitive Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowship (top 1% fellowship score!) for his postdoctoral research on neuro-immune interactions at Rockefeller. We are overjoyed with his accomplishments and eagerly await his future discoveries.

Research Highlights:
– In 2022, we found and studied neural circuits for thermoregulatory behavior. This was published in Neuron.
– In 2022, we published a review paper on neural signaling of gut mechanosensation in ingestive and digestive processes in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
– In 2020, we identified a neural circuit mechanism for monitoring and controlling ingestion based on mechanosensation from the upper digestive tract. This work was published in Nature.
– In 2019, we developed the “ZOOM” technique that enables scalable and isotropic expansion of biological samples with easily tunable ZOOM factors (up to 8x). This was published in Advanced Science and featured as the front cover.