Young Kim

Kim joined the Luddy School in Bloomington in 2026 as Luddy Chair of Intelligent Systems Engineering, after serving as a professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue University since 2007. He holds an adjunct appointment as Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the Indiana University School of Medicine and is an affilated faculty member of the Indiana University Center for Global Health. He serves on the Advisory Board of the NIH Fogarty International Center. 

His research focuses on the co-creation of hardware (devices) and software (models and algorithms) for large-scale societal and healthcare applications. A central theme of his work is color and spectral vision, enabled by hybrid machine learning and AI approaches optimized through domain-informed physical and biological understanding. His research emphasizes parsimonious, edge-ready, and scalable approaches for resource-limited and extreme environments. Specifically, his color and spectral vision research provides a foundation for mobile health diagnostic platforms by extracting spectral and diagnostic information from smartphone photographs. His team conducts collaborative clinical studies in Rwanda, Kenya, and Ghana. His work also advances reverse innovation with direct impact on healthcare in the United States.

His broader research portfolio includes hybrid machine learning, optical imaging, spectroscopy, light-matter (tissue) interactions, metamaterials, physically unclonable functions, anticounterfeiting technologies, and hardware security. His research has been funded by NIH, AFOSR, CDC, VA, USAID, Gates Foundation, Gates Ventures, and Samsung Electronics. He holds more than 40 patents and patent applications and is the founder of HemaChrome and TruChrome.

• Master of Science in Clinical Investigation at Northwestern University
• Doctor of Philosophy in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University
• Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University