Jeehwan Kim

Jeehwan Kim joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty in September 2015. He received his BS from Hongik University, his MS from Seoul National University, and his PhD from UCLA in 2008, all of them in materials science. Since 2008, Kim has been a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, conducting research in photovoltaics, 2D materials, graphene, and advanced CMOS devices. He has been named a master inventor at IBM for his prolific creativity, with over 100 patent filings in five years. Kim’s breakthrough contributions including: demonstration of peeling of large-area single-crystal graphene grown from a SiC substrate, enabling reuse of the expensive substrate; successful growth of GaN on grapheme, with 25% lattice mismatch and demonstrating that GaN films grown from the process function well as LEDs, pointing to a new principle for growing common semiconductors for flexible electronics; and achieving high efficiency in Si/polymer tandem solar cells and 3D solar cells.