Taekjip Ha

Taekjip Ha is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the Department of Physics, part of the Grainger College of Engineering. He also serves as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on single-molecule biophysical techniques to study molecular biology processes, including DNA dynamics, enzymology, and protein-DNA interactions. Ha has pioneered methods such as single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) and combined force-fluorescence spectroscopy.

Ha earned his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley (1996) and held postdoctoral positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Stanford University. He is an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2005) and co-director of UIUC’s Center for the Physics of Living Cells (2008–present). His honors include the American Physical Society Fellowship and election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests:

• Developing novel single-molecule detection methods (super-resolution imaging, vesicular encapsulation)
• Studying DNA helicases, Holliday junctions, ribozymes, and chromatin remodeling
• Exploring mechanical perturbations of biomolecules in vitro and in vivo

His lab actively engages undergraduates, with over 12 students proceeding to graduate programs, and collaborates on projects like helicase mutants and super-resolution imaging algorithms. The Center for the Physics of Living Cells, co-directed by Ha, trains the next generation of biophysical scientists.

Awards:

• Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (2005)
• Fellow, American Physical Society (2005)
• Michael and Kate Bárány Award (2007)
• NSF Award for Center for the Physics of Living Cells (2008)

Labs/Teams: Leads the Single Molecule Nanometry Group (Ha Group) at Johns Hopkins and co-directs the Center for the Physics of Living Cells at UIUC.