Sung-Hou Kim Lab Alumni Reunion

My time in the Kim Lab was a pivotal chapter in my career, marking my transition into computational genomics following training in theoretical physics and computational biophysics. Sung-Hou's scientific passion and inventive spirit were a constant source of inspiration, and the lab's collaborative, nurturing environment is something I look back on with great fondness. Since then, I have been with the DOE Joint Genome Institute, where my work centers on plant comparative and population genomics, with a growing interest in harnessing AI for scientific discovery. On the personal side, our daughter is graduating from college this year — my wife and I could not be more thrilled to watch her step into the next chapter, beginning with a summer of travel and adventure.

Since leaving the BSGC in 2006, I have worked at the Stroud lab at UCSF and then back to LBL at JBEI, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, since 2008. I work under Paul Adams and Henrique Pereira in the Structural Biology group of the Technology Division. My current focus is using HEK293 cells to express lignin-acting enzymes and glycosyl transferases for structural studies.

Both our kids live close by and got engaged this year. We are very happy for them!

The photo I have included is (from the left) our daughter Ezzie, Clem's fiancee Ava, our son Clem, Melanie and myself.

After arriving in Berkeley in 1981, Mary and I had five wonderful years that were highly productive - both scientifically and, with the births of Daniel & Catherine, personally. From there we moved to NJ to join the research group at Roche. It was a very propitious time as it was early on in the SBDD efforts. Long story short, we spent 25+ terrific years at Roche, including a 5-year stint in the UK, and witnessed tremendous advances in our respective areas. Retiring from Roche in 2013, I decided to shift gears and joined a biotech (Forma Therapeutics) in the Boston area. It was an exciting, if slightly anxious, time because like many small companies, we relied heavily on CROs to get much of the actual work done. Fortunately, it all worked out very well with many structures done including many that were novel and/or underwent significant changes upon drug binding. I retired from Forma in late 2018 and we have been traveling ever since.

I am still a professor at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea, and I design proteins with new-to-nature functions (e.g., new antibodies and growth factors).

I am doing organic farming - nowadays growing about 30 blueberry trees in a small shared plot of land. In 2015, Sung-Hou and Rosie visited my garden, and that was when I learned that Rosie was also running an organic farm.!

My daughter (3 years old when I joined Kim's lab) is now married and has a four-year-old daughter of her own. They love my blueberries.

My 2.2 years of training at Kim's lab became the foundation of my later career, for which I remain deeply grateful. I also still vividly remember two of his lectures: one at Berkeley about his personal experience visiting North Korea, and another in Korea on the story behind Watson and Crick’s prediction of the DNA double helix. He is a tremendous storyteller!

Postdoc 1990-1993

He studied computational biology and alignment-free methods under Professor Kim's mentorship.

From 2024 to the present, he has studied how to mitigate and reverse aging using multi-omics data, especially in drug development at Boston University.

His research interests include genome assembly, population genomics, evolution, and drug development.

I studied protein structures using computational techniques in Sung-Hou's laboratory from 1998 to 2000, sharing an office with Ursula Schulze-Gahmen and Igor Grigoriev. That experience sparked a lasting curiosity about protein structure and its application to drug discovery, shaping the course of my career.

The bulk of my career was spent at Plexxikon, where I worked for 21 years, initially leading the computational chemistry group and later serving in senior management roles. Founded by Sung-Hou, Plexxikon became one of the most influential biotechnology companies of its era. The scaffold-based drug design approach that Sung-Hou pioneered helped usher in a new era of structure-guided drug discovery and led to the development of several first- or best-in-class drugs. Vemurafenib, in particular, was one of the first cancer therapies approved alongside a companion diagnostic, setting a new standard for personalized medicine.

After Plexxikon, I spent a brief period at Iambic Therapeutics, an AI-driven drug discovery company in San Diego, before founding Tupos Therapeutics more than two years ago. At Tupos, we are focused on developing precision oral medicines for immune-mediated diseases.

As the first son of Sung-Hou and Rosie, I have countless memories of growing up with the lab—roaming the Calvin building, having grad students come to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, Lab picnics, and just being around a scientific environment for as long as I can remember.

I went on to study Geology as an undergraduate at Princeton University, spent a year teaching English in South Korea, then got my PhD in Geology at Stanford University. I had a two-year post doc at LBNL and UC Berkeley, then officially started my academic career as an assistant professor at Chapman University in Orange, California (15 minutes from Disneyland!). After a 22 year career at Chapman, I recently was named the Dean of our College of Science.

My wife and I now have four kids (two boys, two girls, ages 15, 13, 9, 7) and three dogs who keep us collectively very busy, but also very happy! Our kids enjoy it when “Oma” and “Popob” come to visit.

- Ph.D under Prof. S.H.Kim UC. Berkeley, 1983-1988

- FineArt Department, Washington State University during 2000-2003

- Visiting Scholar and Instructor, University of Toronto, 2003-2004

Current

Professor and Director

Chemistry department

Chemical and Bioengineering department

Washington State University

https://chem.wsu.edu/kang/kang-images/

CSO of Photon Biosciences LLC

https://photonbiosciences.com/team

Debanu lives as if there is no tomorrow. Inspired by his time with Sung-Hou, Rosie, Kim group members and alumni, and the nurturing environment of Berkeley, he has been busy juggling science, entrepreneurship, travel, family and friends over the last decade. In 2015, he started the high-throughput protein X-ray crystallography-driven drug discovery company, Accelero Biostructures. Some results from that were used to start an early oncology therapeutics discovery company, XPose Therapeutics, in 2019, which was acquired in 2026. In 2025, he started a third, and hopefully last company, Build Medicines. Debanu has 34 countries visited under his belt, which is only 17% of all the countries, so still a long list to go. Recent accomplishments have included high-altitude multi-day treks to Everest Base Camp in Nepal; the Tour du Mont Blanc in Switzerland, France and Italy; and a single day Rim-to-River-Same Rim Grand Canyon hike. Debanu’s family includes wife Radha, who works in diagnostics development, and children, Aanika and Rohan. Aanika is very excited to leave home and start college in 2026. Rohan starts high school in 2026. The family is also passionate about travel and sports. Aanika and Rohan are expert black diamond skiers and ski along with Debanu. Rohan is also passionately into soccer and golf, which he got into as a transition after swim team. Aanika is also a black belt in karate, channel swimmer (Alcatraz to SF), varsity water polo player, and PADI-certified scuba diver with Debanu, his scuba buddy and held a couple of high-paying jobs while in high school related to swimming, which we expect will allow her a decent discretionary fund in college.

Postdoc 2004-2007

While with the Kim Lab and LBL I was on the admin team for PBD and was the Budget Analyst for the Kim Group. I left LBL in 2008 and went to UCB as a Budget Analyst for the organizational effectiveness and training group and retired in 2018 as a Process Improvement Consultant. Since retirement I have been focusing on increasing my creative outlets with making greeting cards, dabbling in watercolor painting and becoming obsessed with diamond painting. I spend a lot of time reading, searching the internet for new interests, spending time with my husband and grandchildren and trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle...basically doing what...ever...I want.

Still working on computational chemistry for tRNA, ribosomes, and DNA-protein interactions. (Thanks to a warm intro to these topics by Sung-Hou in 1973)

arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc_pub.html

I work at LBL, leading fungal and algal genomics at the Joint Genome Institute to explore their diversity, evolution, and interactions and also teaching genomics to UC Berkeley students. Our own boys have graduated from UC and left the nest

I was a postdoctoral researcher and Research Associate in Sung-Hou's lab. It was my first job in the United States in 1991, and I remain eternally grateful to Sung-Hou for believing in me and greatly influencing the course of my life. The work in his lab taught me invaluable science lessons. Enough to mention that my first project was concerned with predicting protein folding from its sequence by the artificial intelligence methods. Thirty years too early!

I will always be grateful to Rosie for helping me overcome many challenges during those early years. She patiently answered my many questions that seem simple or naïve now, but at the time were important to me. She was guiding me through everything from the schools my children attended and how to use credit cards, to the everyday practicalities and bigger philosophical questions.

After leaving the lab, I joined the Genomics Division of LBNL and started projects in comparative genomics that resulted in building the very popular VISTA family of software tools, which helped biologists and physicians compare sequences and complete genomes of multiple organisms to reveal functionally significant conservation. I was lucky to participate in several large-scale genome projects that changed modern biology.

I retired from the lab in 2018 but for several years continued various education projects in the US and abroad. Now I am mostly educating myself in AI and other fun tools, with great support from both grown-up grandchildren. My grandson is now a UCB sophomore in engineering, and my granddaughter graduated from NYU in Mathematics. We also have a beautiful new addition to the family — a 7-month-old granddaughter, Sophia, the daughter of our younger son.

My husband and I travel a lot. This picture was taken during our amazing recent trip to India for the wedding of a family friend — as you can probably guess from the Taj Mahal in the background.

Kim Lab was my first paid job in the US, and I cherish the two years I spent there. It sparked my passion for automation, robotics, and collaboration among data scientists, biologists, chemists, physicists, and advanced technology. Aside from work, I am passionate about cycling, which I enjoy both while traveling and commuting. I have cycled in countries such as New Zealand, Scotland, South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Austria, and Spain.

I first joined the Kim Lab at Berkeley as a visiting scholar, primarily focusing on evolutionary studies using and developing an alignment-free sequence comparison approach. Then, I joined a PhD program in Comparative Biochemistry (DE in Computational and Genomic Biology) under the guidance of Sung-Hou Kim and deepened my academic footprint. Since 2024, I have continued working as a postdoc to expand my research background in bioinformatics and evolutionary studies into practical applications, such as therapeutic vaccine sequence design.

Other than work, I have been enjoying playing squash as my regular exercise routine since my years as a PhD student. And focus on networking for career development and community engagement (e.g., KOLIS UC Berkeley representative; Be A Scientist program).

After I retired from Berkeley in 2005 I worked for the next 5 years, first in Celera and then in Gilead. In 2009 I received an award called “successful Czech woman working abroad” from the president of the Czech Republic and the president of the Charles University where I graduated from. It was an interesting trip to Prague.

Now Jiri and I enjoy traveling around the world, visiting family in the Czech Republic, swimming three times per week, and using all the wonderful new technologies to connect with all of our friends. I always liked gardening so I spend a lot of time in my beautiful but very time consuming garden.

Myself:

Started PhD in Sung-Hou's lab with interests in structure and raw coding skills.

Career is summarized over following attempts and pivots:

Attempt1: From cloning to crystallization with mediocre wet lab skills

Pivot1: Computational structural biology sounds fun (circa 2000)

Attempt2: ab initio structure prediction & protein fold space

Pivot2: Bayesian statistics hard to learn, let machine do it (circa 2003)

Attempt3: Combinatorial optimization for Directed Evolution

Pivot3: Garbage-in-garbage-out; need lab automation for data (circa 2010)

Attempt4: Discovery using robotics & imagers (incl. sequencers)

Pivot4: Generation is more thrilling than discernment (circa 2022)

Current attempts: LLM based protein design; Genome manipulation and manipulators.

Family:

College sweetheart Jessica and I celebrated our Silver Anniversary two years ago. We live in Cary North Carolina with two high-school teenager girls. Both of them care deeply for nature, express through painting / music, and take keen interests in science education and communication. All of us miss Bay Area.

Photos:

With iRiM50 (1st generation sensory robot arms, 5 years younger than I)

Family on Boathouse with Skytree backdrop

Visiting Ghibli museum (we are big fans)

Although I am officially a professor emeritus, I still spend much of my time doing research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Looking back, one of the greatest pleasures of my career has been the opportunity to work with talented students, postdocs, and colleagues from around the world, from China and India to Canada and beyond. They have not only enriched the science but have kept my days lively, my thinking fresh, and my coffee breaks full of accents, stories, and new ideas. My scientific interests continue to center on the nervous system, especially acetylcholinesterase (AChE), a protein that has occupied a large part of my career. More recently, we have been studying intrinsically disordered proteins related to AChE, which, true to their name, can sometimes seem to resemble academic committees. I live on the Weizmann campus, which gives me the luxury of a very short commute and allows me to remain closely connected to the Institute community that has been such an important part of my life. My wife, Haya, passed away about fifteen years ago, and I think of her often. I am fortunate that my three children and three grandchildren all live nearby, allowing me to enjoy one of life’s great rewards: being a very present and occasionally useful grandpa.

Since leaving the Kim Lab, my journey has taken me through the worlds of structural biology and biotherapeutic drug discovery across the West Coast.

After a rewarding postdoc at Caltech diving deep into membrane protein structures, I transitioned to industry, leading protein and antibody discovery teams at Amgen and Janssen.

Most recently, I served as the Associate Director of the Discovery Pipeline at Encodia in Sorrento Vallley, San Diego, where I led teams developing antibody–DNA conjugate programs and integrating AI-guided protein design with high-throughput automation.

Outside of the lab, I’m based in lovely Carlsbad Agua Hedionda lagoon and love taking full advantage of the coast as an avid paddle boarder.

After completing my postdoctoral training at University of California, Berkeley, I spent two years at Gyeongsang National University before joining Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine as a professor in 2000, where I have remained to the present day. During this period, I also spent sabbatical years at Berkeley and at University of Oxford, which allowed me to experience life in different English-speaking countries. I currently live in Seoul, Korea.

My eldest daughter, Nah-Yeon, who was born while our family was living in the United States, is a New York–qualified attorney currently working in Singapore at K&L Gates, an American international law firm. She is planning to move this summer to Bae, Kim & Lee LLC (BKL, 태평양) in Korea. My younger daughter, Min-Kyung, is currently a senior at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, majoring in civil engineering and computer science. She also serves as the concertmaster of the university orchestra, and the photo was taken during last year’s annual concert. My wife, Hye-Yeon, previously worked in the biotechnology industry, but has since left the field and is now passionately devoted to playing the cello.

My research has primarily focused on the structure and function of nucleic acids, as well as the development of therapeutics based on nucleic acid biology. In addition, as the director of BICS (Biomedical Institute for Convergence at SKKU), I oversee and coordinate biomedical science research activities across the university.

My current apartment is located right below Guryong-Mountin, so every morning I wake up to the sound of birds. From my home, I enjoy observing how the mountain changes day by day through the four seasons. It has become one of the quiet pleasures of my daily life.

Today also happened to be Teachers’ Day in Korea and came just before my 60th birthday, which is traditionally regarded as one of the most meaningful milestones in Korean culture. To celebrate this occasion, members of my current laboratory and many former students and postdoctoral fellows gathered together, both in person and online. Over the years, more than 70 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers have trained in my laboratory, and it was deeply meaningful to reconnect with so many of them at once. The gathering reminded me that, beyond research achievements and publications, one of the greatest rewards of academic life is the long-lasting relationships and shared memories built together with students and colleagues. I truly enjoyed this special day filled with warm encouragement, laughter, and gratitude.

Over the past several years I have continued working in biotechnology as a scientist and entrepreneur. I am currently Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of BeyondSpring Inc. (NASDAQ: BYSI), where we are developing new cancer therapies, including our lead drug candidate, a first-in-class agent Plinabulin, for lung cancer and other solid tumors. I am also co-Founder and CEO of SEED Therapeutics, a company focused on targeted protein degradation, where we are collaborating with several global pharmaceutical partners to translate this technology into new medicines. It has been rewarding to help build and grow a number of biotech companies over the years in both the U.S. and China, and I continue to enjoy working at the intersection of science, medicine, and entrepreneurship.

My son Sam is 20 and a junior at the University of Rochester studying mechanical engineering. He’s really into robotics and serves as president of the robotics club, where his team is building a robot to compete at Kennedy Space Center this May.

In my free time I enjoy running, designing dresses with my tailor, and traveling to interesting places. I also love going to concerts and supporting the arts whenever I can.

After completing my degree and a brief postdoc with Sung-Hou, I spent two years as a research scientist at LBNL before joining LANL as staff member in 2001. Over the years, my work at LANL has involved a diverse array of projects. I am deeply grateful for the scientific training and transferrable capabilities beyond structural biology I acquired while working with Sung-Hou and team.

We still live in the Bay Area.  Our daughter Clara is starting her doctoral studies at Stanford this fall, while older son Loren is a rising junior at Cal EECS. Our younger son Calvin is a rising junior in high school and recently received some ISEF and IEEE awards for one of his projects. As for me, I try to spend a little time daily to stay active.

After leaving the Woodshop, I was a post-doc with Michael Rossmann at Purdue University, and then worked at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Connecticut, for five years. I joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1997, served as Department Chair 2013-2019, and have been the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences since 2015. We have revealed the molecular mechanisms of many crucial cellular processes (such as metabolism and RNA processing), using crystallography and now primarily cryo-EM. More information about my lab and our research can be found in the website below.

I have two wonderful sons. My older one, Alex, is currently a post-doc in the Bustamante lab at Berkeley; he started his PhD in the Chemistry department 31 years after my joining Sung-Hou’s lab! My younger one, Michael, works for a trading firm in New York, but is currently based in Hong Kong.

Thank you, Sung-Hou, for five memorable years in the Bay Area. I look forward to seeing you, Rosie, and everyone in August.

https://tonglab.biology.columbia.edu/

Liang Tong, PhD, 1984-1989

My wife Kelly and I live in Apex, NC near my oldest stepdaughter, Beth, and our two grandkids Ethan (8) and Grace (11).     Kelly is a retired IT director from GSK and I am currently CEO of a company in the Research Triangle Park called GeneCentric and have been there over 7 years now.    One of the major highlights of my professional career was working with Sung-Hou to help start Plexxikon and I really caught the bug of working with early-stage biotech companies and have been doing that ever since Plexxikon.

My youngest son, Gabe, will be attending MIT as a Ph.D. graduate student in Math starting in the fall.     Gabe is currently working at GeneCentric doing bioinformatics and some deep learning models with our blood-based DNA sequencing data.

Most weekends Kelly and I can found at our beach house in Ocean Isle Beach NC and very much enjoy the summer concerts (see attached picture).

We are looking forward to catching up with friends and special colleagues on August 1st!

I have been a Principal Researcher and Group Leader at ITQB NOVA, a higher education and research Institute of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa since 2008, and by the time we meet in August I should already have retired as of July 1. I will remain active in research, mostly in a supporting role to younger researchers.

From 2019 to 2023, together with a colleague who has now moved to another institution, I coordinated a EU-funded Twinning project with acronym IMPACT that was focused on bringing knowledge on CryoEM methodologies to the ITQB NOVA. We both made a significant contribution to obtaining the grant that funded the purchase and installation in the North of Portugal of the first national Cryo-TEM.

Even more recently, I coordinated the process for the purchase of a 120 kV TEM with cryo capability that has been installed at ITQB NOVA and is expected to begin regular operation before the end of the Summer.

I treasure the memories of my stay in Berkeley - not only of the people in Kim's lab (Sung-Hou, Rosie, Jaru, Liang, Mike Milburn, Bart de Vos and the late Bill Scott) but also of other people I met while there, namely my housemates at 1416 Oxford street.

I retired in 2010, but just before that I joined an urban farm in our town of Moraga, CA. After living in Moraga for 28 years, I was surprised to discover it! The farm has one acre, 60 fruit trees and 70 volunteers. We grow tomatoes (about 800 plants), peppers, eggplants, summer squash, and cucumbers, which we sell to local markets and restaurants to cover expenses. We also hold a spring plant sale.  I had never been much of a gardener, but the farm has taught me a lot—and Sung-Hou and I eat very well. Even better is the community we have become a part of.

I have also served on the board of a theater in Berkeley for six years and I am involved in several other nonprofits.

Our family keeps us busy as well. Chris and Jeannine live in Orange County with Jasper (15), Kai (13), Rosalie (9), and Isla (8). Jon and Atia live in Los Angeles with Zia (6) and Amara (4). We visit often—Southwest Airlines certainly appreciates our loyalty. The Christmas photo was taken in 2024, and the photo with the grandchildren is from Thanksgiving 2025 (Amara, Isla, Kai, Zia, Rosie, Rosalie, Jasper, and Sung-Hou). We go to SoCal every two to three months.

In addition to working at the Farm, I continue to do Iyengar yoga, go for walks, and do Apple Fitness online.  Life is busy.

The Kim lab is a truly special place in my heart — it was my very first professional home in the United States, and the place where everything began for me. When I arrived, I was navigating not just a new research environment, but an entirely new country, culture, and language. What made all the difference was the warmth and generosity of the people here. Thank you for being the foundation of everything that followed.

Now, I am working in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas. My research projects focus on the analysis and integration of multiomics data—including genomics, microbiome, transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, proteomics—to study disease and environment and to identify biomarkers using statistical learning, machine learning, and deep learning methodologies. In parallel, I conduct pathogen surveillance research, leveraging genomic and microbiome data integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) to monitor and track infectious disease and understand the mechanisms and dissemination of antibiotic resistance, with an emphasis on two clinical applications: infection prevention and antibiotic stewardship. My wet laboratory activities focus on real-time surveillance of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, particularly in immunocompromised patient populations.

I often reflect fondly on my years in Sung-Hou’s lab - the intellect of the group and the Bay Area in general is something I genuinely miss; we don’t quite get that same kind of cerebral ferment down in Southern California! Some may remember - Sung-Hou was gracious enough to allow me to explore neural networks for protein structure prediction at a time when we were apparently ~30 years too early. I am certain those AlphaFold folks would not have achieved their milestones were it not for the hard work of you and your colleagues doing the experimental structural work. Content is king. I have been AI-ing ever since Cal (see below), with some kind of neural network project just about every year. I have spent the better part of the last quarter century running Eidogen-Sertanty Inc., a cheminformatics and drug discovery company I founded. I met my wife Kirsten in the middle of my graduate work at McNally’s in Oakland - commuting back and forth from the round building to my place in Lake Merritt on that unforgettable powder blue scooter. Despite that - Kirsten still married me and we have two daughters: Lili (28), a Berkeley alum herself with an MPH, and Hannah (26), currently in her fourth of six years in a medical program at Semmelweis University (Budapest).

It’s wonderful to reconnect with this group. Sung-Hou, I would not be where I am today were it not for you. Thank you!

Steven Muskal, Ph.D. 1991

P.S. After putting this site together, I grabbed a domain - Please add a toast for Sung-Hou (password: kimgroup) - https://toastshk.com/

Since 2018, I have been working as senior staff scientist at the Gladstone Infectious Disease Institute in San Francisco. I am still using structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics to screen for or characterize drug candidates. I am especially interested in antiviral drugs and have been working on coronavirus and HIV. My structural studies on HIV-Tat complexes with host transcription factor P-TEFb are a basis for much of the HIV drug screening work.

I am living with my husband in El Cerrito, just 20 mins north of UC Berkeley. My other interests are gardening, reading, Yoga, knitting, exploring other crafts, and staying in touch with my family in Germany. My son, Stefan, is also working in Science by now, and my daughter, Sabina, is currently assistant manager in a Cafe.

Since leaving Kim lab in 2006 I joined MedImmune LLC which soon got acquired by AstraZeneca where I still work heading Structural Biology group. Because of my appointment Natalia left her job in BioRad. After changing jobs few times Natalia joined Fina Biosolutions. She is VP of Protein Sciences there. Our older son, David, got married in 2022 and now we have granddaughter Sophia. Younger son Phillip followed steps of his brother and now both work in finances.

Weiru and his wife Ye have been East Bay locals, Lafayette and Orinda, in the past 25 years. They currently share their home with Travis, a King Charles Spaniel who keeps things lively. Ye and Weiru love staying active; they've done some major hikes with friends, including the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim in 2023 and the Tour du Mont Blanc in 2024. Ye has also been on a marathon run lately, finishing Berlin in August 2025 and London just this April.

Their sons Alex and Patrick are both thriving in tech. Alex is at Capital One near D.C., working in the field of internet security. Patrick skipped college after high school, had a great run at a Fin-Tech startup in San Francisco that grew into a unicorn. He has now taken the leap to start his own company.

On the work side, Weiru received his postdoctoral training in the Kim lab here at Berkeley, then jumped into Biotech industry, first at Plexxikon in 2002, then 14 years at Genentech, where he did research in structural biology and helped bring many medicines to life. He's now at Frontier Medicines leading the Protein Sciences & Structural Biology group, still doing what he loves: hunting for drugs that make a difference for patients.

I left the Kim lab after obtaining my PhD in 2000. I then spent the next 11 years at UT Southwestern, first as a postdoctoral fellow in Steve Sprang’s lab and later as research faculty in the Department of Biochemistry with Steven McKnight. In 2011, I joined Peloton Therapeutics as a founding biologist and began my career in industry. At Peloton, we successfully developed an inhibitor of the HIF-2 protein, and the company was acquired by Merck in 2019. In 2020, I joined Hansoh Bio in Rockville, Maryland, a subsidiary of Hansoh Pharma in China.

My family has also grown quite a bit since the Berkeley days. We already had Reggie and Rex when we left Berkeley, and later we were blessed with Rhema and Rachel. Reggie married Ina, and they now have a beautiful daughter, Maggie. Rex is still single. Rhema will be attending Johns Hopkins University this fall, and Rachel will be starting high school.

Attached is a photo from our family reunion in Louisiana. From left to right are Rachel, Reggie, Ina, Maggie, Rex, Rhema, Xinlin, and Lilly. In the center front is Leo, a family favorite.

After leaving the Kim Lab, I worked at Genentech for 12 years, until 2019. Since then, I’ve been busy with my family. Our daughter Maomao is 22 and a senior at UCLA, majoring in Asian American Studies and Human Biology and Society. Our son Doudou is 15 and a sophomore at Aragon High School. My husband, Shaojiang, works at Kind Pharmaceuticals. We usually travel back to China once or twice a year to visit family.

Hello (and bonjour) from Canada!

After graduating in 2000, I went on for a post-doc at Yale before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2004. My research has focused on bioinformatics and computational biology, particularly gene regulation, comparative genomics, and cancer genomics. My oldest daughter is in her third year at U of T and my youngest boy is in grade 6.

I look back fondly on the grad school years at Berkeley, the friendships and the mentorship I received from Sung-Hou, Rosie, Ed, Li-Shar and many others. I remember the long hours in the Calvin Lab cold room, the thrill of spotting a crystal under the microscope, the many synchrotron trips to Brookhaven, Cornell and SSRL , and seeing a good diffraction pattern.  It is hard to imagine now that we were able to take ice boxes with crystal trays passing the airport security back in the day. Those were the days before AI and the best days.

I look forward to returning to Berkeley and seeing Sung-Hou, Rosie and old friends again.

Zhaolei Zhang, PhD (2000)

Predicting very early that siRNA would become the next successful medical drug modality after antibodies made me financial independent at age 58. At age 60 I then decided to stop contributing to drug development to focus on other things in my life. That was 5 years ago.

These days I read a lot and watch science programs and lectures covering the wide range of my interests e.g. paleontology, anthropology, evolution, geology, neurobiology (especially research about consciousness), psychology, advances in medicine (especially research relating to aging), astronomy, astrobiology, astrophysics, AI, history, sociology, geopolitics, macro economy, finance, global warming, energy technologies, circular economy solutions.

I try to stay up-to-date on global developments and try to learn something new every day. However, being now about two-thirds through my life it doesn't happen so often anymore that I come across something truly new, something that significantly contributes to my agnostic atheistic worldview. I am a birds-eye-view kind of guy. I want to understand concepts and patterns and try not to get bogged down in details too much.

I cook a lot. I am not seeing cooking as a chore. It is a hobby and I try all the time to increase the scope of my skills.

To maintain physical health I regularly exercise. I go jogging. I lift weights (not to gain muscle mass. I just do enough to maintain my strength). I go swimming. I walk and bicycle a lot. That’s life in Tokyo. Everything can be done by walking, bicycling and taking public transportation.

Six to eight month of the year I stay in Tokyo. The summers I spend with my father in Germany near Trier, where I was born. His house is in the country side. There I mountain-bike a lot. I also need to maintain my father’s garden.

The time is definitely ripe to visit friends in the US. However, at the current distorted Yen/USD exchange rate (FX: ¥159/USD vs PPP: ¥93/USD) and under the current administration I don’t want to visit. It is too expensive. And too risky, considering my brushes with immigration in the past.

I wish you guys a nice reunion event. I have never forgotten about my time in Berkeley and all the people I met at the Calvin Lab. It was a wonderful time in my life.

If you would like to know what I did after my time at the Calvin Lab then please read my LinkedIn profile. In a nutshell, I did my postdoc at Genentech. Then joined Roche in Japan. Later Roche bought Chugai and I became a Chugai employee. I stayed there until I retired.

At Genentech I made a knockout mouse as part of a study into the function of a blood clotting related protein. At Roche I started as a scientist supporting crystallographers and I was involved in oncology. I, again, became involved in research about farnesyl transferase. Then I got into proteomics (LC-MS). After getting an MBA I moved into research planning. There I did a variety of jobs e.g. supporting project managers and top research managers with whatever information they needed. This could be info regarding novel disease treatment approaches, specific drug targets, technologies or info regarding competitors. It could be a second opinion about an in-house project or proposal. I regularly participated in project review meetings during which I often played the devils advocate. Although I covered all disease areas, I focused mostly on kidney disease research. I became the "scientific sparring partner" of the head of kidney research. I developed a number of large multifunctions Excel add-ins to automate a variety of complex info & data analytical tasks. Those years after the MBA were the most interesting in my career.

I have a couple favorite memories.

Most memorable was the event when the accelerator cable of my VW van broke on the way to Tahoe to the Kim Group ski trip. We continued the trip with me at the steering wheel and Andrew sitting in the back of the car above the engine operating the accelerator cable by hand in responds to my calls. That was true team work.

Memorable were also the many Sandcastle building events I joined with the Calvin Group team. We won many tournaments over the years in e.g. Alameda, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach, San Diego.

I completed my postdoctoral fellowship in Sung-Hou’s lab under Rosie’s supervision from September 2000 to December 2002.

And a lot has happened since then.

I married Bénédicte (who did her postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley with Tom Alber) in 2003; we bought a small house in Alsace in 2005; Camille was born in 2008 and Paul in 2013. We moved to the Paris area following a career change for Bénédicte. We bought a house in 2014, where we still live today.

I still work in the lab in Fontenay-Aux-Roses, and Bénédicte after almost 12 years being a teacher in biology is now the assistant principal at a high school in Versailles.

Outside of work, I’m still playing music (drums, a little bass guitar when I was at Berkeley, and saxophone since September 2025). I do a bit of exercise to stay in shape (swimming and basketball once a week). With the COVID lockdown, in addition to going bald, I’ve taken up baking and try to make something (pies, cakes, mousses, or other desserts) once a week. Bénédicte does Nordic walking and listens to a lot of classical music. We're taking advantage of being in the Paris area to do visits, see concerts, and attend some shows. Paul, after seven seasons of soccer, wants to take up rifle shooting — he wants to be a sniper in a Gendarmerie SWAT team. Camille does a lot of artistic projects; she danced for many years and plays a little drums with friends and started playing electric guitar two years ago. She is taking her high school graduation exams this year and plans to study veterinary medicine — a passion of hers since early childhood.

After serving as a foster family for guide dogs for the blind and visually impaired people for eight years, we adopted a little Chartreux cat, named Alpine, last year.

That’s my family in a nutshell. It’s not easy to summarize 25 years in a few lines!

It’s hard to pick just one memory from my time at Berkeley!

There were so many good times.

One of my first little stories was my first bus ride to the BSGC. I didn’t understand the driver, so I ended up going all the way to the Advanced Light Source at LBNL and back twice. A second anecdote was during the first evacuation drill following an earthquake alert. I hadn’t understood all the instructions and was declared buried just two months after arriving in Berkeley!

Two memorable and painful memories. The first was the morning of September 11, 2001, when I didn’t immediately realize what was happening when I arrived at the lab and saw everyone gathered in front of a television. The second event was Jeroen’s passing, and especially the fact that I couldn’t express my feelings to his family because I couldn’t find the right words in English. These events were part of my time at Berkeley, but my main memories are Sung-Hou and Rosie’s enthusiasm, the trust they placed in me, the kindness of the people, the weekend spent with Bruno’s family, the visits to nearby parks, and the events organized to build team spirit (barbecues, hikes, gatherings where we presented our countries, ...) and a Thanksgiving dinner at Rosie and Sung-Hou’s house where I ate a gratin with marshmallows. Weird but interesting.

It was truly a wonderful experience. I was a little nervous before coming, but I met some amazing people, and it was a very important milestone in my life. Thank you all so much.

Postdoc from 1989 - 1991

I have fond memories of my years in the lab – great friendships were forged. I worked on ras and the aspartate receptor under Sung-Hou’s guidance. After finishing up in the lab, I did I second postdoc at UCLA, and then back to Canada for a Faculty job at the University of Toronto / Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. I have worked on a wide range of systems, including membrane proteins and transcription factor complexes. Some projects evolved into structure-based drug design. I am still amazed by what proteins can do.

Susan and I raised two kids – now 22 and 27 and off on their own. I am starting a slow transition into retirement and have picked up birding and cheesemaking as hobbies to keep me occupied outside of science. Actually, cheesemaking is half art and half science with all the microbiology and complex chemistry that happens to the lipids and proteins during maturation.

A sincere thanks to Sung-Hou and Rosie for all that they have done to help me in both Science and Life.

Regrets for not being able to attend. Best wishes to all!

Gil

Camping and skiing trips!

I joined the Kim Group in March 1999 and remained there until February 2007, when I left Berkeley to join Korea University in Seoul, Republic of Korea, as a faculty member. During my time in the Kim Group, I married Grace (Eunhye), and we became the parents of two sons, Noah (2003) and Isaac (2007). Since then, I have continued my academic career at Korea University. My current research interests include fungal genomics, microbiome engineering, synthetic biology, and AI-assisted genome analysis. More information about our research can be found at http://www.choilab.org I recently turned 60. Lately, Grace and I have started running together, and we even completed our first 10 km race. I ranked 6,070th out of 9,571 participants (photo below)! If anyone has a chance to visit Korea, please feel free to contact me — you are always welcome!

Old Google Photos (https://photos.app.goo.gl/239ECg7bH8zqZGje8) - I first began my research on ribosome structures in the X-ray Crystallography Group (the Kim Group was very close to winning a Nobel Prize... haha). Thanks to Weiru and Dong-Hae, I learned the fundamentals of X-ray crystallography, and Jaru had truly magical hands for crystallization.

I still fondly remember the morning coffee gatherings at Strada Cafe with Alfonso, David, Weiru, Jeroen, and many others from the third floor of Calvin Lab. And of course, the Friday beer parties on the first floor with Hisao and many other colleagues. There were also the simple but warm moments — sharing homemade lunch boxes in the third-floor lounge with Xinlin, and the kindness of Rosie, who often invited postdocs living alone out for delicious meals. Didier was always cheerful and full of positive energy. Later, thanks to Igor and Chao, I began working in computational genomics, which eventually shaped much of my later career. I also have many fond memories of Jingtong's and Greg's couple. I am searching for old photos and will upload them later. Those Berkeley years remain some of the most unforgettable and meaningful times of my life. All thanks to Sung-Hou and Rosie!

Greetings! I am known as GaGa to my two granddaughters Clover (6) and Holly (3). I spend quite a bit of time in Felton, CA with them and their parents Bryan (my son) and Jamie. They are my main focus these days. We read a lot of books together and talk about science. Maybe one or both will continue in the footsteps of their grandparents and parents. My other interest is a recent discovery of the music of The Grateful Dead. Although Steve and I would watch Deadheads out the office window walking to concerts at the Greek, neither of us appreciated their music. Now years later, Bryan introduced me to the sound, and I’m a fan with a quite a collection of CDs. I was also one of those crazy dog grandmas until my terrier Flapjack passed last Nov at age 16. I plan to get another pup at some point though. I still live in Moraga and deeply miss my husband Steve (also an alumnus) who passed away 9 years ago this month. He would have been such a great Grandpa to the girls.

I shared an office with Steve Holbrook and Jaru Jancarik near the front door. We would eat lunch together and oftentimes, various labmates would stop by to chat. Many good memories of conversations about both science and life in general. And we can’t forget the store! Having no vending machine in the building, this provided snacks to hungry researchers as well as opportunities for more chats.

I have dedicated my career to RNA research, focusing on tRNA biology, biochemistry, and mechanism. I learned to appreciate tRNA when I was with SungHou and I liked the tRNA structure that he solved. While I did not work on tRNA when I was with SungHou, I did a postdoc with Paul Schimmel where I used engineered stop-codon suppressors to elucidate the determinants of tRNA aminoacylation. I won a prestigious international fellowship to perform advance study with Richard Giege at the CNRS Institute, Strasbourg, France, focusing on indirect readout of tRNA aminoacylation. I began my independent career at Jefferson, initially focusing on the determinants of the tRNA L-shaped tertiary structure, which was followed by mechanistic studies of how the two classes of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases approach the tRNA L-shaped structure. We then expanded to study the mechanism of tRNA maturation, starting with the ubiquitous tRNA CCA enzymes acting on the tRNA 3'-end, which led to tRNA epigenetics. We recently expanded to study modifications in all three major types of RNAs, including the cmo5U34 and m1G37 modifications in tRNA that modulate the quality of decoding, the m62A methylation of A1518-1519 in bacterial 16S rRNA that determines initiation of protein synthesis, and the m6A and ψ modifications in mRNA that regulate gene expression. To study each, we have developed novel reagents, tools, and enzymatic assays, to probe the mechanism at multiples interfaces. We are a constant resource for research on tRNA, and we reach out to others to broaden our impact on human health and disease.