My Full Curriculum Vitae (Updated: Jan 2025)

Biographical Sketch

Myongin was born in Seoul, Korea, and moved to Oakville, Ontario, at the age of 18. His passion for chemistry and mathematics led him to pursue a Ph.D. in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Western Ontario under the guidance of Professor Styliani Consta. With an emphasis on hydration and electrostatics, his doctoral research focused on computational and analytical modelling of macromolecule-solvent interactions in nanodroplets.

To expand his expertise to biophysical and biomedical applications, he decided to pursue postdoctoral research with Dr. Donald F. Weaver at the Krembil Research Institute and the University of Toronto, studying the critical roles of water in the brain and drug design for prevention of inflammation in COVID-19 and Alzheimer's disease. His pursuit of deeper biophysical insights took him to Professor Jessica M. J. Swanson’s lab at the University of Utah, where he developed data-driven approaches for enhanced sampling of peptide folding, membrane permeation of a drug molecule, and protein binding to lipid droplets. Transitioning into a principal investigator role at Koniag Government Services for the FDA, he focused on machine learning-aided drug discovery, creating graph neural network models for predicting mu-opioid drug properties. He then joined the research group of Professor George Khelashvili at Weill Cornell Medicine as a postdoctoral associate, advancing computational methods for automated collective variable discovery for transmembrane protein conformational transitions and protein-ligand interactions, while collaborating with a pharmaceutical company on drug design projects targeting pulmonary fibrosis.

In January 2025, he began his new journey as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he leads a research program at the intersection of computational chemistry, artificial intelligence, and mathematical modelling, with diverse applications in molecular biophysics, drug discovery, and sustainable chemistry.