Jeehwan Kim

Jeehwan Kim

Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering (Department of)
Assistant Professor, Materials Sciences and Engineering ( Department of)

77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 38-276
Cambridge, MA 02139

jeehwan@mit.edu
617.324.1948

Personal Website

Jeehwan Kim joined RLE in the summer of 2015. He received his BS from Hongik University, his MS from Seoul National University, and his PhD from UCLA in 2008, all of them in materials science. Before MIT, Kim has been a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center since 2008, conducting research in photovoltaics, 2D materials, graphene, and advanced CMOS devices. He has been named a Master Inventor at IBM for his prolific creativity, with over 100 patent filings in five years. Kim’s breakthrough contributions including: demonstration of peeling of large-area single-crystal graphene grown from a SiC substrate, enabling reuse of the expensive substrate; successful growth of GaN on grapheme, with 25% lattice mismatch and demonstrating that GaN films grown from the process function well as LEDs, pointing to a new principle for growing common semiconductors for flexible electronics; and achieving high efficiency in Si/polymer tandem solar cells and 3D solar cells.

His group is currently developing a graphene-based layer transfer technology  which offers infinitive growths & transfers of high quality single-crystalline semiconductor films on single-crystalline graphene. Prof. Kim’s team has been investigating a method to perform van der Waals epitaxy of defect-free single-crystalline films on epitaxial graphene in general material system and studying mechanics for repeatable & precise exfoliation of epilayers on graphene. The group’s focus is on fabricating high performance electronic/photonic/photovoltaics devices with low manufacturing cost based on this graphene-based layer transfer technique.