Korea VirusResearch Institute

  IBS has launched a new Chief Investigator(CI) group within the IBS Korea Virus Research Institute (KVRI) effective December 1.

  A new Center, the Center for Virome and Applied Platform, has been established within the Korea Virus Research Institute. Within this Center, the first CI group — the Systems Virology and Spatial Immunomics Group — will be led by Professor PARK Jong-Eun of KAIST Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering. Professor Park, age 38, is a rising research leader known for pioneering work in single-cell transcriptomics and immune cell development.

  Professor Park received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Seoul National University and continued his research at the IBS Center for RNA Research (Director KIM V. Narry). He later joined the international Human Cell Atlas project, led by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, as a core member. His scientific excellence has been recognized with the EMBO Advanced Fellowship (2020), awarded to outstanding early-career independent researchers.

  His research has elucidated key mechanisms of immune responses underlying infection, aging, and autoimmune diseases within complex biological environments. Representative achievements include: identifying T-cell formation mechanisms in the developing human thymus (Science, 2020), constructing a fetal immune development atlas (Science, 2020), characterizing early action mechanisms of mRNA vaccines (Nature Communications, 2024), and uncovering physical tissue properties and early aging microenvironments in the liver (Nature Aging, 2025).

  The newly established CI group will develop a research platform that reconstructs infection and immune responses as data-driven digital twins based on single-cell genomics, combined with spatial omics analysis to resolve virus-induced immune responses at the tissue level. “Infection and immunity are among the most dynamic processes in biology, and quantitatively understanding them is key to overcoming viral diseases,” Park said.