Dr Jang Ah Kim is a Lecturer at the Hamlyn Centre, Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is interested in researching the interaction between light and matter and using this knowledge to develop new strategies in the fields of biomedical sensing and robotics at the micro/nanoscale. This involves the design and creation of micro/nanostructures for diagnostic purposes such as detecting infections, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases and developing new microscopic therapeutic and surgical strategies such as localised drug delivery and cellular surgery.

She graduated from Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering in 2011 and then completed her PhD in Nano Engineering from the same university in 2017. During her PhD, she developed chemical vapour deposition (CVD)-grown graphene-based fibre-optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors for biochemical detection and fibre-optic contact force sensors for remote real-time monitoring of physical contact between tissue and a cardiac ablation catheter. She joined the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery/Department of Computing at Imperial College London in April 2017 as a Research Associate in Sensing. She developed a miniature fibre-optic surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensor using state-of-the-art micro/nanofabrication techniques, including two-photon polymerisation (2PP), for rapid diagnosis of diseases (e.g. bacteria detection for infection screening, etc.) in minimally invasive surgeries (MIS)/interventions. She also discovered and studied the induced bacterial swarming effect in the vicinity of plasmonic nanostructures for a new biological micro-robotic operation strategy. She worked as a Research Associate in Biosensing at the Stevens Group (now at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, University of Oxford, since 2024) in the Department of Materials, Imperial College London, from September 2021 to August 2023, to further investigate the improvement of 2PP-based SERS sensor fabrication and to study SERS sensing mechanisms at the nano-to-molecular level for the development of high-dimensional sensing technology.