While in college, Sangmoo Jeong never anticipated his career would take him from studying solar cells and batteries to metabolism and disease. Having already completed a bachelors and master’s degree in electrical engineering, he was well on his way to completing his PhD in the same field. In fact, Jeong was in his fourth year of research when he collaborated on a project with colleagues at Stanford University, inspiring him to change research directions in his postdoctoral fellowships.
“My PhD research is very different to what I am doing now. It was all about renewable energy devices, particularly solar cells. I am still working with cells, but with a different kind of cell now,” said Jeong.
Jeong’s nanofabrication expertise helped him achieve two major accomplishments while working on his PhD. The first was developing an ultra-thin, highly efficient silicon solar cell with his advisor, Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, which held the highest efficiency among ultra-thin devices in the world at that time. The second was the collaborative project with colleagues in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology who wanted to study the mechanisms of how mechanical properties in the plasma membrane link to spatiotemporal localization of proteins in living cells and needed a device that could do so. The success of this project became the turning point in his research.
“My colleagues, even my research advisor, did not want me to get involved in biological research until after I finished my postdoctoral work and secured a faculty position. They were worried about me because I didn’t have a biology background and they didn’t want that to put me behind. But I saw it as a new adventure and thankfully I landed at a great lab at Harvard that helped me build my biology foundation,” said Jeong.