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Eun Sok Kim

William M. Hogue Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Education

  • 1990, Doctoral Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of California - Berkeley
  • 1987, Master's Degree, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California - Berkeley
  • 1982, Bachelor's Degree, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California - Berkeley

Biography

Prof. Kim's doctoral dissertation in 1990 was on the integrated microphone with LSI CMOS on a single chip. In Fall 1999, he joined the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he is currently a Professor of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering-Electrophysics. From July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2018, he chaired the Electrophysics division of the department, and oversaw a net tenure-track-faculty growth of 2.5 (from 15.25 to 17.75), 6.5 new tenure-track-faculty hires, 3 new tenure-track-faculty offers and acceptances in the last year as the chair, a net non-tenure-track-faculty growth of 4 (from 4 to 8), a net Budget-Analysts growth of 2 (from 3 to 5), and lab space growth of 4,206 sq. ft. (from 26,833 to 31,039 sq. ft.). During his tenure as the chair, US News' ranking raw score on USC EE's Graduate Program rose from 3.9 to 4.2 (out of 5.0).

From Spring 1991 to Fall 1999, he worked at the Department of Electrical Engineering in the University of Hawaii at Manoa as a faculty member. Previously, he worked at IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA, NCR Corp., San Diego, CA, and Xicor Inc., Milpitas, CA as a co-op student, design engineer, and summer-student engineer, respectively.

Professor Kim is an expert in acoustic, piezoelectric and vibration-energy-harvesting MEMS, having published a textbook entitled, “Fundamentals of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS),” about 270 refereed papers, and 19 issued US patents (along with 5 pending US patents) in the field. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Institute of Physics (IOP). He serves as an editor for IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems. He has been awarded a Research Initiation Award (1991-1993) and a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (1995-1999) by National Science Foundation. He received Outstanding EE Faculty of the Year Award at U. of Hawaii in May 1996 and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering 2006 Best New Application Paper Award.

He has secured about $20M as the contact Principal Investigator (PI) in non-equipment research grants ($18M as his portion only), and currently leads a research group of two postdocs and seven Ph.D. students, being funded by four active NSF and four active NIH R01 grants, on all of which he is the contact PI.

Research Summary

(1) biomedical technologies based on self-focusing acoustic transducers, (2) wearable hearing/listening systems based on acoustic MEMS, (3) power generation from human movement without loading/limiting the human, (4) tamper detection for semiconductor chip authenticity, (5) bulk acoustic-wave tweezers, (6) bulk acoustic-wave resonators at GHz, etc.

Eun Sok Kim Research Summary


Awards

  • 2023 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow
  • 2011 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow
  • 2007 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award
  • 1996 Institute of Physics (IOP) Fellow
  • 1996 IEEE Student Chapter of U. of Hawaii Teaching Award
  • 1995 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award
  • 1991 National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award
  • 1982 University of California at Berkeley B.S. EECS with High Honors
Appointments
  • Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Electrophysics
Office
  • PHE 602
  • Charles Lee Powell Hall
  • 3737 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089
  • USC Mail Code: 90089-0271
Contact Information
  • (213) 740-4697
  • eskim@usc.edu
Links