Dr. Seung Rak (School of Medicine), appointed as Associate Professor at Inje University

Dr. Seung Rak (School of Medicine), was appointed as Associate Professor at Inje University in March 2023.

Dr. Seung-Rak Lee studied at Sungkyunkwan University for his bachelor’s degree in School of Medicine in 2015, after he received his Ph.D degree in "Chemical investigation of secondary metabolites from the termite-associated bacterium, Streptomyces sp. M56 (Professor Ki Hyun Kim as advisor) in February 2020. After that, he spent about two years in the Department of Chemistry of Princeton University through post-doctoral training at the Korea Research Foundation and Sungkyunkwan University and conducted research on new secondary metabolites derived from dormant biosynthetic genes of microorganisms through various molecular biological and chemical techniques. Dr. Seung-rak Lee published a total of 64 SCIE papers and won the Future Prospective Pharmacist Award, the Namgang Academic Award, and the Outstanding Oral Presentation Award at the Pharmaceutical Society of Korea and The Korean Society of Pharmacognosy.

Dr. Seung-rak Lee developed a new natural product research strategy that stimulates various dormant biosynthetic genes of fungi and discovered a number of new secondary metabolites. Recently, under the theme of " Induction of diverse cryptic fungal metabolites by steroids and channel blockers", and its research results were summarized and published as him as the first author in Angewandte Chemie-International Edition (IF: 16.823).

In addition, through a postdoctoral research course at Princeton University (Department of Chemistry), he focused on securing, identifying the structure, and studying the biosynthesis process of secondary metabolites. Through this, a number of inflammatory secondary metabolites have been discovered from bacteria that cause intestinal inflammation in the human body, and he is researching in-depth inflammation and immune activity.

Dr. Seung-rak Lee said, "We will continue to discover new physiologically active substances derived from natural materials so that we can take the lead in discovering leading compounds for the development of innovative new drugs."