ASTRA CONFERENCE 2026

Jong-Eun Park

Invited Speaker, Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), KAIST

Jong-Eun Park, PhD
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering (GSMSE), KAIST, Republic of Korea
Chief Investigator, Korea Virus Research Institute, IBS, Republic of Korea
(jp24@kaist.ac.kr; https://sites.google.com/view/scmglkaist)

Dr. Jong-Eun Park is a Professor at KAIST whose research bridges RNA biology, single-cell genomics, and computational modeling of complex human immune systems. He began his scientific career with biochemical and sequencing-based studies on RNA processing, elucidating molecular mechanisms of miRNA and non-coding RNA maturation. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, he joined the Human Cell Atlas consortium and led major efforts to profile developing human immune organs at single-cell resolution, including the Human Thymus Atlas. His work reconstructed human T-cell developmental trajectories and repertoire formation, providing foundational resources for understanding human immune ontogeny. He also contributed to the development of BBKNN, a widely adopted algorithm for scalable integration of large single-cell datasets.

Since establishing his independent laboratory at KAIST, his research has centered on integrative single-cell and spatial genomics to study immune–tumor and tissue microenvironment interactions across cancer, inflammatory, and infectious diseases. His group develops large-scale data integration frameworks and multimodal atlases to model cell states, cell–cell interactions, and tissue organization in human health and disease. Recently, he has expanded this effort by joining the Korea Virus Research Institute in the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) as a Chief Investigator, where his team is advancing computational and experimental modeling of cell–cell interactions and tissue systems using single-cell and spatial omics.