Jacob Suter Jammer Professorship in Electrical Engineering

JIN U. KANG is the Jacob Suter Jammer Professor of Electrical Engineering. He is a professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, conducting research on biophotonics, fiber optics, and optoelectronic devices for applications in medicine and biosensing. A main focus area is the development of real-time, ultrafast optical coherence tomography 3-D imaging and sensing systems for guided surgical intervention. Using this technology, Dr. Kang has developed a “smart” surgical tool that will better enable ophthalmologists to perform surgery on the delicate retina.

Dr. Kang earned his doctoral degree from the School of Optics at the University of Central Florida in 1996. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins in 1998, he was a research scientist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. He has developed various fiber optic lasers, from single longitudinal mode tunable lasers to mode-locked femtosecond lasers. He also was the first to experimentally demonstrate the existence of several important novel effects and devices, including Manakov spatial solitons and backward-propagating second-harmonic generation. During his career, Dr. Kang has published more than 130 journal papers and contributed to over 180 conference proceedings; he has given numerous invited talks at international conferences. He holds more than 30 patents in fiber, many of which are licensed to medical robotics companies. He is the recipient of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, an Australian Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship, a NASA Faculty Fellowship, an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Fellowship, and a Brain Korea Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Dr. Kang has served as co-director of the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, Pacific Rim, and he is a program committee member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Asia Communications and Photonics Conference and of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) biosensing group. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and SPIE. He was a topical editor of Optics Letters and is an editorial board member of the Optical Society of Korea. He also serves as a National Global R&D Advisory Committee Member of the South Korea Ministry of Knowledge & Economy.