Jongwon Lim received his bachelor's degree (2017) and master's degree (2020) in biomedical engineering from Yonsei University, South Korea. He earned his PhD in bioengineering in 2024 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he currently is a postdoctoral fellow. During his PhD, he developed a novel blood-drying technique that reduces detection times for sepsis and hepatitis pathogens from five days to two and a half hours. He aims to further revolutionize the field by achieving 100 times faster diagnostics to reduce sample preparation from hours to under 30 seconds. He envisions his low-cost, portable, ultrafast platform replacing slow, centralized laboratory workflows with a smart material-based approach. In 2024, Lim was selected from 7,000 international conference attendees for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening Innovation Award — making him only the fourth student in SLAS history to receive the award. At UIUC, he has participated in the Mavis Future Faculty Fellows Program and the Rising Stars Workshop, and he was a 2024 fellow of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies-Salzburg Global Leadership Initiative and a 2022 Baxter Young Investigator Awardee. He believes the ability to engage beyond disciplinary boundaries is essential for faculty. As a professor, he will use a blend of interactive lectures, hands-on labs, and project-based learning to connect theory with application, and he will empower students to think critically, design experiments thoughtfully, and embrace challenges as learning opportunities.

Research Interests

Infectious disease diagnostics