The Department of Chemistry is welcoming three new tenure-track faculty members this academic year.
Joomyung “Vicky” Jun joined the department as an assistant professor in August, and Xiaotang Lu and Mayuko Isomura will officially start as assistant professors in January 2025.
Jun, Lu, and Isomura come to Illinois following exceptional postdoctoral research experiences at prestigious institutions, MIT and Harvard. All three said they consider working with students one of the most exciting aspects of launching their independent research careers in academia.
“I am excited to work with young, motivated students full of potential,” Jun said. “I look forward to fostering the synergy through interactions with students and both multidisciplinary collaborations, which I believe are key to resolve challenging biomedical problems.”
Isomura said, “I am most excited to work with highly motivated students at Illinois, conveying the fascination of organic chemistry research by sharing the thrilling experience of creating new molecules and reactions with our own hands, ones that no one in the world has yet discovered.”
Lu said it’s exciting to return to the field of chemistry after spending several years in a neurobiology lab, but she is most excited about working with students.
“I look forward to working with young minds to tackle the toughest questions in science,” Lu said.
Joomyung (Vicky) Jun
The first of the trio to officially join the faculty, Jun is already on campus, working from Roger Adams Laboratory on launching her lab in the organic and chemical biology areas of chemistry.
Originally from South Korea, Jun received her B.Sc. degree in chemical biology at UC Berkeley and participated in undergraduate research with Prof. Ken Raymond.
“I have been very fortunate to have amazingly supportive mentors throughout my scientific career. I especially want to acknowledge Prof. Ken Raymond, who gave me my very first research opportunity and told me, ‘The late bloomers are often the best flowers,’ a statement that has stayed with me,” said Jun, who went to work for two years at the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before starting the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania.
“My doctoral research at Penn was focused on the development of novel and underexplored fluorogenic small molecules to study the misfolding of α-synuclein protein, a key protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease,” Jun said.
To expand her expertise in chemical biology into translational research, Jun pursued postdoctoral research at MIT in the lab of Ron Raines, where she received two postdoctoral fellowships from the Koch Institutive for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the Life Sciences Research Foundation sponsored by Shurl and Kay Curci foundation.
Jun advanced the utility of diazo compounds in protein-based drug delivery by devising a rapid synthesis method to discover a new reversible late-stage protein modification strategy. That led to several collaborations, including work with world-class biomedical engineering labs at MIT building therapeutic platforms for in vivo protein delivery.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jun founded the Postdoc Buddy Program at MIT to foster a diverse and inclusive community among postdocs. They often start without a cohort, Jun explained. The program has successfully integrated over 995 postdocs from more than 40 different departments, labs, and centers across 44 countries and was recognized with the 2022 Infinite Mile Award from MIT's Office of the Provost and Vice President for Research.
At Illinois, Jun is interested in developing modular chemical tools to address biomedical problems in drug delivery at the molecular level.
“My research vision is to provide molecular-level insights into drug delivery and revolutionize the field of medicine by introducing proteins as next-generation therapies for currently undruggable diseases,” she said. “My research program will encompass synthetic organic chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical biology to train students to branch out to nanotechnology, biomedical engineering, pharmacology, and optical imaging.”
Jun will be teaching Chem 570: “Concepts in Chemical Biology” to the incoming graduate class this fall.
“Chemical biology is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field with applications in diverse areas in biomedical research,” Jun said. “I am excited to train the next generation of chemical biologists and curious to see how this new generation will navigate their own chemical biology research.”
Xiaotang Lu
Originally from Huangshan, China, Lu said the beautiful mountain town is famous for its scenic beauty and was the filming location for the bamboo forest scene in the movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
After completing her undergraduate and master’s studies in China, Lu moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in Materials Engineering in Prof. Brian Korgel’s lab at the University of Texas at Austin, where her graduate training focused on nanomaterials for energy applications.
While she was fascinated by the numerous applications enabled by nanomaterials, Lu became interested in other nanostructures in nature that give rise to a multitude of important functions: the interconnected neurons that make up our brain. She decided to shift focus for her postdoctoral research and worked with Prof. Jeff Lichtman at Harvard, who pioneered connectomics, a nascent field in neuroscience that aims to produce and analyze comprehensive wiring diagrams of the brain.
Lu’s postdoctoral research focused on developing tools and refining techniques to overcome challenges in connectomic studies. She received a National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative Pathway to Independence Award, which supports highly qualified postdoctoral researchers in mentored research experiences and then independent research positions.
“The technical challenges in this new field and the aspiration to understand how the interconnected nanostructures in our brain translate to diverse functions, and how diseases disrupt those connections, motivated me to pursue a career in academia,” Lu said.
At Illinois, Lu’s research will focus on developing biochemical tools and methods to enable multimodal, multiscale, and multiplex brain circuit imaging with the goal of applying newly developed technologies to understand neuropsychiatric diseases.
“These diseases not only lack cures, but they are also not associated with any specific pathology, which may be embedded in the disrupted nanoscale connections between neurons,” Lu explains. “Our work will provide new insights into the diagnosis and prognosis of these conditions. But first and foremost, we need new chemistry to enable us to ‘see’ the pathology of the mis-wired neurons.”
Lu will also be in the classroom this coming Spring, teaching Chem 588 – “Physical Methods for Materials Chemistry.”
Mayuko Isomura
As a high school student in Tokyo, Isomura’s chemistry tutor would often share graduate-level chemistry and research.
“Through him, I discovered the fascinating aspects of chemistry and the excitement of engaging in cutting-edge research,” said Isomura, who went on to study chemistry at the University of Tokyo, where she did undergraduate research in Prof. Eiichi Nakamura’s group and discovered that she enjoyed reaction development. After graduating at the top of her class, Isomura completed a master’s degree at the University of Tokyo.
With a fellowship from the Funai Foundation, she left Japan for Switzerland, where she completed a PhD in the research group of Illinois chemistry alum Prof. Erick M. Carreira at ETH Zürich and studied the development of enantioselective reactions using transition-metal catalysts.
Some pivotal moments in her research so far include discovering a new reaction and the exhilaration of realizing, at that moment, that she was the only person in the world who knew about the reaction.
“Another moment was the joy of exploring the molecular world, after observing puzzling reactivity, and then elucidating its mechanism by various methods. I wanted to further deepen my knowledge in this field during my postdoctoral research,” said Isomura, who was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship to pursue postdoctoral work at Harvard University in the research group of Prof. Eric N. Jacobsen, a former Illinois chemistry faculty member.
As a postdoc, Isomura has studied organocatalysts (hydrogen-bond donor catalysts) through the development of asymmetric reactions, DFT calculations, and collaborative research with industry, involving new screening techniques.
Isomura said studying under the supervision of two great alumni of UIUC definitely gave her a strong dream to work at this outstanding university. And now as a new assistant professor, Isomura will focus her research on reaction development, identification and design of practical catalysts, asymmetric synthesis, and mechanistic studies employing methods of physical organic chemistry.
“There are still many unknowns in the world of organic chemistry. I eagerly look forward to challenging what is considered ‘common knowledge’ or ‘difficult’" as taught in textbooks and solving the problems with curiosity and excitement,” said Isomura, who added that she is very happy to be starting this phase of her scientific career.