Nam, jwa-min
Professor, Department of Chemistry, Seoul
Jwa-Min Nam won numerous awards including Collegiate Inventors Award, National Inventors Hall of Fame, USA & USPTO (2004), Victor K. LaMer Award, American Chemical Society (2006), Outstanding Research Achievement Award, Ministry of Edu., Sci. & Tech., Republic of Korea (2010), Presidential Young Scientist Award, President of the Republic of Korea (2012), Distinguished Lectureship Award, Chemical Society of Japan (2013), Basic Research Award, the Minister, Ministry of Science and ICT, Republic of Korea (2017), SNU Excellence in Research Award, Seoul National University (2021) and Outstanding Inorganic Chemists Award from the KCS Inorganic Chemistry Division (2022).
Designing, synthesizing, and controlling plasmonic metal nanostructures with a super high precision (nm or sub-nm precision) are of paramount importance for the reliable and widespread use of plasmonic nanostructures in optics, nanoscience, chemistry, materials science, biotechnology, and medicine.
In particular, synthesizing plasmonic nanostructures that can generate reliable, quantifiable optical signals is the key to the practical use of plasmonic enhancement-based spectroscopies such as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Here, I will introduce molecularly tunable and structurally reproducible plasmonically coupled and enhanced nanostructures (e.g., plasmonic nanogap structures) with strong, controllable, and quantifiable plasmonic signals.
I will then show their potential in addressing some of the important challenges in plasmonics, biosensing, bioimaging, biocomputing, and nanomachinery including quantitative SERS and scalable DNA computing, and discuss how these new plasmonic materials and platforms can lead us to new breakthroughs in the next-generation disease diagnostics including the liquid biopsies for early-stage cancers and infectious diseases.