Dr. Young Jik Kwon is a professor at UC Irvine in the Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry departments. Following his undergraduate education in Biological Engineering at Inha University, Dr. Kwon received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Southern California with a focus on retroviral gene delivery in 2003 and did postdoctoral training in the department of chemistry at UC Berkeley on polymeric vaccine carriers. He started his academic career in Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in 2005 where he was the M. Frank and Margaret Rudy assistant professor and moved to UC Irvine in 2007 where he got promoted to an associate professor with tenured (2011) and a full professor (2015).

He currently oversees research at the BioTherapeutics Engineering Laboratory (BioTEL) at UC Irvine and his current projects mainly focus on gene therapy, drug delivery, and vaccines using recombinant viruses, stimuli-degradable polymers, and cellular vesicles. Dr. Kwon is a member of the NCI-designated Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Institute for Immunology, the Cancer Research Institute, and the Center for Virus Research at UC Irvine. Dr. Kwon’s work was awarded the Medical Research Award from Gabrielle's Angel Foundation for Cancer Research in 2010, the Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation in 2010, and the Faculty Career Development Award from UC Irvine in 2008. He was also an invited scholar to Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2013-2015) and a Brain Pool Scholar in Korea University in Seoul, Korea (2015-2016). He has co-founded several startup companies based on his research discoveries. He has recently been selected to be a Faculty Innovation Fellow of the Beall Applied Innovation, the technology transfer and start-up incubation group at UC Irvine.