Dr Min Kyung Shinn is a Lecturer in the Physical Sciences of Life in the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London. Min leads a multidisciplinary research group at the interface of biochemistry and biophysics to investigate the molecular mechanisms of protein assemblies involved in gene regulation. Her research focuses on proteins with intrinsically disordered regions.

Min received her BA in Physics and Chemistry from Bard College in the US in 2014. She then went on to receive her MA in Physics in 2016 and her PhD in 2020 from Washington University in St. Louis under the supervision of Professor Timothy Lohman (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Washington University School of Medicine), working on the thermodynamic profiling of interactions involving the single-stranded DNA binding (SSB) protein in bacterial DNA repair pathways.

Min completed her postdoctoral training with Professor Rohit Pappu in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, investigating the mechanism for biomolecular condensate formation by undergoing microphase separation, using a combination of computational and experimental approaches for characterisations at multiple length scales. She was awarded the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from the National Institute of Health.

Research Interests

• Intrinsically disordered proteins
• Mechanism of macromolecular assembly
• Biomolecular condensates
• RNA binding proteins

The Shinn group investigates the molecular mechanisms for protein assembly formation with a focus on the role of intrinsically disordered regions in gene regulation. The group uses a combination of biochemical and biophysical characterisations of protein assemblies, quantitative measurement of protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions and computational methods including atomistic simulations for a set of comprehensive observations across multiple length scales.