Jieung Oh, a BME graduate student (MS-PhD combined course, Advisor: Professor Joo H. Kang, Department of Biomedical Engineering), has been awarded the best podium presentation award for his outstanding talk on the diamagnetic blood plasma separation method in the “Young Pioneer Session” of the 2021 Spring International Biochip Conference and Exhibition, which was held in Hong Chung, Kangwond-Do on June 16-18, 2021.

He is currently pursuing his MS-PhD combined program under the supervision of Professor Joo H. Kang and conducting his research on developing liquid biopsy sample preparation methods. In the “Young Pioneer Session” of the conference, he presented his research work entitled “Hemolysis-free blood plasma separation using diamagnetic repulsion of blood cells in a mobile platform,” which was conducted with his colleagues; Seyong Kwon (Research Assistant Professor) and Min Seok Lee (MS-PhD student) in the Translational Multiscale Biofluidics (TMB) Lab of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST. This work also was studied in collaboration with Prof. Eujin Um and Prof. Joonwoo Jeong in the Department of Physics at UNIST.

Biochip is an interdisciplinary research field involving Bio-MEMS, biosensor, nano-convergence, and healthcare developed to improve human healthcare. Every year, hundreds of biochip researchers from academic and industrial fields gather together in the KBCS to present their research results and share multidisciplinary ideas for the most recent biochip topics.

This year the KBCS conference was held on/offline due to the covid-19 virus crisis with a theme entitled “Biochips in the New Normal”.

Professor Kang’s current research interests include developing biomedical engineering tools for tackling infectious diseases and cancers, and various miniaturized biomimetic physiological devices, such as organ-on-a-chips.