Assistant Professor MinJun Kim along with his international research team comprised of Dr. Josh Edel, Imperial College London, UK, and Dr. Per Jemth, Uppsala University, Swede, has received the prestigious Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award for his project entitled, “High Resolution Folding/Binding Kinetics of Single Protein Molecules within Nanofluidic Structures.” The HFSP Young Investigator Grants support international teams of scientists who are focusing on fundamental issues in the life science by combining expertise from different disciplines. Only 9 teams among 600 proposals over the world have made it this year.

The objective of the project is to define a new single-molecule nanoanalytical technology which will enable the efficient detection of non-covalent molecular interactions with microsecond resolution in order to answer fundamental questions about these proteins, for example, what comes first, folding or binding? The budget of the HFSP Young Investigator Award program is $1.05M for 3 years and Drexel’s portion is $350k.