Eunsuk Kim
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
You may wonder why certain foods you eat contain metals like iron, copper and zinc. The short answer is your body needs them.
The reason, explains Eunsuk Kim, an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, is these metals are critical to engineering many of the chemical reactions in our bodies. Metalloenzymes — proteins that function as an enzyme and contain metals that are tightly bound and always isolated with the protein — help make the chemical reactions fast and efficient, just the way the body likes them.
Kim is a bioinorganic chemist. What she does is create synthetic compounds that mimic the active site and function of metalloenzymes.
“The functions of metalloenzymes are related to human disease,” says Kim, who grew up in Seoul, South Korea. “If they don’t work well, diseases can occur because the human body doesn’t work as well. But we don’t know the properties of these reactions.”
Kim’s goal is to figure out those properties. Or, as she puts it, “to better understand the fundamental chemistry of metalloenzymes.”
Kim says she’s always been interested in inorganic chemistry. But as she learned more, she realized she could parlay that knowledge to perhaps a more altruistic application.
“I still do all the inorganic chemistry,” she says, “and at the same time I can make contributions to help myself and to help others.”
She has an environmental bent as well, seeking to understand the role of metalloenzymes in chemical reactions such as converting carbon dioxide, a waste product, to methane, which can act as fuel.
Kim, who turns 38 this fall, earned her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. She followed that with postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Besides continuing her research, she will teach advanced inorganic chemistry at Brown.
She’s been interested in science since she was young and chemistry specifically because of its fundamental nature. “It’s basic science,” Kim says. “You can create something useful from out of nothing. You kind of feel like you’re God or something.”