KAIST
Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Separations,
from molecules
to systems

Membranes, Materials,
Machine Intelligence Laboratory

์ฒจ๋‹จ ์†Œ์žฌ๋ฅผ ์‹ค์ œ ๋ถ„๋ฆฌ ๊ณต์ •์œผ๋กœ.
์‹คํ—˜๊ณผ ๋จธ์‹  ์ธํ…”๋ฆฌ์ „์Šค๋กœ ๊ทธ ์—ฐ๊ฒฐ์„ ์•ž๋‹น๊น๋‹ˆ๋‹ค

Explore our research โ†’

Membranes โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Sorbents โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Nanoporous Materials โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž DAC (Direct Air Capture) โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Artificial Intelligence โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Bayesian Optimization โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Self-Driving Laboratory โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž

Membranes โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Sorbents โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Nanoporous Materials โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž DAC (Direct Air Capture) โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Artificial Intelligence โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Bayesian Optimization โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž Self-Driving Laboratory โ€Žโ€Žโ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž โ€Ž

Research

  • Membranes

    Selective membranes for complex liquid and gas separations, from materials to scalable modules.

  • Materials & Systems

    Sorbents and integrated systems for carbon removal, hydrogen purification, and carbon utilization.

  • Machine Intelligence

    Bayesian optimization and self-driving laboratories to accelerate experimental discovery and process development.

Nature (2026)

Our mesoporous membranes bring molecular separations to complex crude oil mixtures, opening a route toward less energy-intensive refining.

Explore the research โ†’

Featured research

A membrane route to crude oil fractionation

MMML research illustration of crude oil fractionation using a mesoporous membrane

People behind
the research

We bring together materials science, separation engineering, and machine intelligence at KAIST.

Meet the team โ†’
Join MMML โ†’

MMML research group at KAIST in spring 2026

From the lab

News
Prof. Koh Joins Chemical Engineering Journal as an Editor

Prof. Dong-Yeun Koh joined Chemical Engineering Journal as an Editor on October 1, 2026, serving in the Environmental Chemical Engineering section.

๊ณ ๋™์—ฐ ๊ต์ˆ˜๊ฐ€ 2026๋…„ 10์›” 1์ผ๋ถ€๋กœ Chemical Engineering Journal์˜ Editor๋กœ ํ•ฉ๋ฅ˜ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Editorial Board

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Jihwan 2.0: Now a Master's Student!

A familiar face is staying with MMML! Jihwan Kim joined us as a master's student on September 1, 2026, following his time as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome aboard, Jihwan!

ํ•™๋ถ€์—ฐ๊ตฌ์ƒ์œผ๋กœ ํ•จ๊ป˜ํ–ˆ๋˜ ๊น€์ง€ํ™˜ ํ•™์ƒ์ด 2026๋…„ 9์›” 1์ผ๋ถ€๋กœ ์„์‚ฌ๊ณผ์ •์— ํ•ฉ๋ฅ˜ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

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New Article in Science Advances

Our work on plasma-treated carbon molecular sieve membranes has been published in Science Advances. The study shows how a simple plasma treatment improves hydrogen separation and long-term membrane stability. Congratulations to Banseok, Hyeokjun, and Jeongsu!

ํ”Œ๋ผ์Šค๋งˆ ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌ ํƒ„์†Œ๋ถ„์ž์ฒด๋ง‰์— ๊ด€ํ•œ ์—ฐ๊ตฌ๊ฐ€ Science Advances์— ๊ฒŒ์žฌ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฐ˜์„ ์ถ•ํ•˜!

Read the paper

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New Article on Electrochemical Ocean Carbon Removal
New Article on Electrochemical Ocean Carbon Removal

Our latest work on electrochemical dissolved ocean carbon removal (e-DOC) is now out in Advanced Energy Materials! Inhwan and Young Hun, together with Prof. T. Alan Hattonโ€™s group at MIT, developed a compact hollow-fiber electrode assembly that converts dissolved inorganic carbon in seawater into stable mineral carbon. By moving mineral formation away from the electrode surface, the new architecture tackles one of the most persistent challenges in electrochemical ocean carbon removal: scaling.

Super congrats to Inhwan and Young Hun!

์ „๊ธฐํ™”ํ•™์  ํ•ด์–‘ ํƒ„์†Œ ์ œ๊ฑฐ(e-DOC)์— ๊ด€ํ•œ ์—ฐ๊ตฌ๊ฐ€ Advanced Energy Materials์— ๊ฒŒ์žฌ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค! ๋ฐ•์ธํ™˜ ํ•™์ƒ๊ณผ ์ด์˜ํ›ˆ ๋ฐ•์‚ฌ๋Š” MIT T. Alan Hatton ๊ต์ˆ˜ ์—ฐ๊ตฌํŒ€๊ณผ ํ•จ๊ป˜ ๋ฐ”๋‹ท๋ฌผ ์† ์šฉ์กด๋ฌด๊ธฐํƒ„์†Œ๋ฅผ ์•ˆ์ •ํ•œ ๊ด‘๋ฌผ ํ˜•ํƒœ๋กœ ์ „ํ™˜ํ•˜๋Š” ์†Œํ˜• ์ค‘๊ณต์‚ฌ ์ „๊ทน ์กฐ๋ฆฝ์ฒด๋ฅผ ๊ฐœ๋ฐœํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ด‘๋ฌผ์ด ์ „๊ทน ํ‘œ๋ฉด์ด ์•„๋‹Œ ์™ธ๋ถ€์—์„œ ํ˜•์„ฑ๋˜๋„๋ก ์„ค๊ณ„ํ•ด ์ „๊ธฐํ™”ํ•™์  ํ•ด์–‘ ํƒ„์†Œ ์ œ๊ฑฐ์˜ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ๊ณ ์งˆ์ ์ธ ๋ฌธ์ œ ์ค‘ ํ•˜๋‚˜์ธ ์Šค์ผ€์ผ๋ง์„ ํšจ๊ณผ์ ์œผ๋กœ ์ค„์˜€์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ธํ™˜์ด์™€ ์˜ํ›ˆ์ด, ์ •๋ง ์ถ•ํ•˜ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค!

Paper

https://doi.org/10.1002/aenm.71205

KAIST Research News

https://researchnews.kaist.ac.kr/researchnews/html/news/?mng_no=65310&mode=V

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New Article in Nature
New Article in Nature

Our latest work on membrane-based crude oil fractionation is now out in Nature. Super congrats to Jihoon and Hyeokjun (Jihoon Choi, ์„œํ˜์ค€)! These guys worked tirelessly (with gas masks on) to uncover the mysterious molecular separation enabled in mesoporous membranes.

Nature Paper: https://rdcu.be/fqejQ
Nature Research Briefing: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01896-9
KAIST press release: https://bit.ly/4vPmsi7
๊ณผํ•™๊ธฐ์ˆ ์ •๋ณดํ†ต์‹ ๋ถ€(MSIT) Press release (Korean): http://bit.ly/4vO9JvT

๋ณด๋„์ž๋ฃŒ ๋ชจ์Œ (Press releases): here

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MMML Consortium Selected for InnoCORE: We're Hiring Six Postdocs
MMML Consortium Selected for InnoCORE: We're Hiring Six Postdocs

Our consortium has been selected for InnoCORE, the national postdoc-centered research program to drive world-class, AI-converged science and technology. The InnoCORE project is bridging fundamental separation science and real industrial deployment.

We are looking for postdocs interested in membrane separations combined with self-driving laboratory capabilities.

Positions come with a competitive salary (~60k USD including benefits). We welcome PhD graduates (or soon-to-be graduates) with backgrounds in membrane science, chemical engineering, materials science, separations, robotics/automation, or machine learning in the physical sciences.

See our consortium: https://www.innocore.or.kr/kaist/projectOverview/kaist_prj09

Apply here: https://forms.gle/XTnAqMhHDgX4FCRv5

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All news โ†’

Recent publications

  1. Yugyeong Sung, Ingyu Park, Miseong Kim, Yunseok Lee, Yeonwook Kim, Seungin Lee, Dong-Yeun Koh, Ah-Hyung Alissa Park*, Youngjune Park* (2026). Impregnation of liquid-like nanoparticle organic hybrid materials in mesoporous fiber sorbent with hierarchical structures for scalable direct air capture. Chemical Engineering Journal, 548, Article 181601 DOI View publication
  2. Banseok Oh, Injun Park, Dong-Yeun Koh* (2026). Joule-Heated Woven Fiber Contactors for Direct Air Capture. Energy & Fuels, 40(42), 23417-23426 DOI View publication
  3. Abdulrahman AlMashaan, Aqil Jamal, Dong-Yeun Koh, Jay H. Lee* (2026). Cycle-by-cycle optimization of direct air capture (DAC) operation under varying ambient air conditions. Chemical Engineering Journal, Article 183475 DOI View publication
  4. Banseok Oh, Hyeokjun Seo, Jeongsu Wi, Dong-Yeun Koh* (2026). Plasma engineered carbon molecular sieve membranes for precise and stable hydrogen permeation. Science Advances, 12(35), Article eaee7783 DOI View publication
  5. Jihoon Choi, Hyeokjun Seo, Minyong Lee, Woong-Chul Shin, Jaemin Choi, Keonwoo Choi, Min-Jun Jang, Sung Gap Im, Jae W. Lee*, Ryan P. Lively*, Dong-Yeun Koh* (2026). Crude oil fractionation by means of mesoporous polyacrylonitrile membranes. Nature, 654(8120), 955-962 DOI View publication