Hyejun Kim is a Ph.D. student working where RNA biology meets computation. Hyejun is currently at the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, studying how RNA sequence and structure together determine function, with a focus on microRNA biogenesis. Hyejun is also interested in RNA stability and translational control, and combines conventional NGS analysis (RNA-seq, CLIP-seq, Ribo-seq) with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing and machine learning.
Beyond this work, Hyejun took part in a 2025 Nature Microbiology study showing that a long non-coding RNA of human cytomegalovirus counteracts nuclear cGAS, a sensor of foreign DNA, to help the virus evade immunity. Earlier, Hyejun led a study of microRNA profiles in seborrheic dermatitis (Scientific Reports, 2022). Hyejun also writes small tools for everyday transcriptome analysis, such as utilities for GENCODE annotations and for building clean reference sets of mRNAs.
Current project
Codename HAIRPIN ORACLE. Every primary microRNA folds into a hairpin, and the Microprocessor (DROSHA–DGCR8) decides whether to cut it. HAIRPIN ORACLE is a deep neural network that reads an RNA sequence and predicts how efficiently that cut will happen, for any pri-miRNA, including ones nobody has tested yet. The goal is to turn high-throughput measurements into a map of the whole sequence space, and to ask what the model learns about structure along the way.
Research interests
microRNA biogenesis · DROSHA · RNA structure · Machine learning · sequence-function map · RNA stability · Translation
Education
- 2022–present M.S./Ph.D. Student, School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University
- 2018–2022 B.S. in Biological Sciences, Seoul National University
Publications with our lab
- Human cytomegalovirus long non-coding RNA counteracts nuclear cGAS to facilitate immune evasion
Nature Microbiology (2025), 10(9):2275-2290