Dr. Taekjip Ha
Dr. Taekjip Ha is George D. Yancopoulos Professor of Pediatrics in honor Frederick W. Alt at Harvard Medical School and senior investigator of Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.
He has also been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2005. He develops and uses single molecule and single cell measurement tools to study life at high resolution. Dr. Ha received a bachelor in Physics from Seoul National University in 1990 and Physics Ph.D from University of California at Berkeley in 1996. After postdoctoral training at Stanford, he was a Physics professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2015 and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University 2015-2023.
Dr. Ha serves on Editorial Boards for Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected as President of the Biophysical Society in 2021.
Course Description
My goal is to provide students with an understanding of principles of single molecule fluorescence microscopy and its integration with optical tweezers, with emphasis on single molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET) and fleezers (fluorescence+tweezers). The students will learn the principles of fluorescence imaging and spectroscopy, learn the principles of measuring single molecule conformational dynamics using smFRET, learn the principles of optical tweezers and its integration with single molecule fluorescence analysis, and get hands-on training on extracting smFRET time traces and histograms from raw movie files using the student’s own laptop.