ProfessorJi-Seon Kim

Ji-Seon Kim is Professor of Solid State Physics, Director of the EPSRC Plastic Electronics Centre for Doctoral Training (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/plastic-electronics-cdt/) and MRes in Soft Electronic Materials at Imperial College London. She also held a Specially Appointed Professorship at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), and a WCU Professorship at KAIST (South Korea). She has previously taken up an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, obtained a PhD in Physics in 2000 under the supervision of Prof. Sir Richard Friend.

Kim's group research focuses on the materials science of sustainable molecular semiconductors, extending it towards New Electronic Materials including organic electronic/ionic mixed conductors and organic/inorganic hybrids. We explore fundamental scientific issues related to using these sustainable electronic materials for novel optoelectronic applications (e.g. solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photoconversion sensors, synaptic transistors, biosensors). It also parallels with developing Advanced Nanometrology for these materials. We have established non-invasive structural spectroscopic techniques such as molecular vibrational spectroscopy as an advanced structural nanoprobe for molecular semiconductors. We have demonstrated its unique capability, when combined with molecular density functional theory simulations, being able to elucidate the key molecular design requirements which determine the performance of a wide range of optoelectronic molecular semiconductor devices. Combined with energetics spectroscopy, we have provided fundamental understanding of key molecular origins and structural dynamics that control the device functionality and performance for organic semiconductor devices. The Nanoanalysis Group (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/nanoanalysis-group) led by Kim works together with industrial partners including Samsung Electronics, CSEM Brazil, KP-Tech, CDT Ltd. and NPL.

Examples of current research projects:

Molecular Semiconductors for Sustainable Clean Energy Generation
Probing and Manipulating Polarons in Molecular Semiconductors
Mixed Electronic-Ionic Materials Towards Low-Powered Sustainable Healthcare Applications
Energetic and Kinetic Analysis of Electronic Materials for Solar Driven Photoconversion
Interface Engineering for High Performance Energy Storage Applications

Kim has been elected as the Fellow of Institute of Physics (2023) and the Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (2022) and the UK EPSRC Strategic Advisory Board Team member (2020-26), as well as EPSRC Physical Sciences Skills Focus Group member for Physical Sciences. She has also been appointed as an Invited Visiting Professor, School of Materials and Chemical Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan (2019-25), an Invited WCU Professor Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea (2009-2013), as a Chair of Examiners for the EPSRC Sensors CDT in Cambridge (2021-24), and the Advisory Board member for the Steering Group for the Coated2/M2A EngD programme in Swansea University (2017-22). She is also acting as an Editorial Advisory Board member for Applied Physics Letters (since 2020), Associate Editor for Organic Electronics (since 2020), International Advisory Board member for Advanced Electronic Materials (since 2022) and Editorial Board Member for Aggregate (since 2024).

Please note that Ji-Seon Kim joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in 2025 as Professor of Electronic Materials, as part of the Sustainable Chemistry and Materials Initiative (https://chem.web.ox.ac.uk/people/ji-seon-kim).

If you are interested in joining Ji-Seon's research group as a postdoctoral researcher, postgraduate student, or undergraduate project student/ intern, please contact Dr. Gihan Ryu (gryu@imperial.ac.uk) for more details.