Taekjun Kim, Ph.D. #

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• Research Scientist
• Department of Neurobiology and Biophysics, Washington National Biomedical Research Center, University of Washington

Professional Summary #

Education #

• Ph.D. in Vision Science, University of California, Berkeley
• M.A. in Biological Psychology, Seoul National University, Korea
• B.A. in Psychology, Seoul National University, Korea

Research experience #

University of Washington, Washington National Primate Research Center #

Research Scientist (Jun 2025 – Present)

• Investigating prefrontal cortex (PFC) modulation of V4 population dynamics via inhibitory feedback mechanisms to model inter-areal functional connectivity.
• Co-Investigator validating 80-channel subdural Wireless Floating Microelectrode Arrays (WFMAs). Designed closed-loop, saccade-based go/no-go visual psychophysics paradigms and maximum-likelihood curve-fitting models to characterize phosphene perception thresholds under intracortical microstimulation (ICMS).
• Built computational models of visual crowding in PyTorch, comparing biological population dynamics from primate area V4 with convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures.

Acting Assistant Professor (Jan 2023 – May 2025)

• Investigating how the prefrontal cortex modulates feature selectivity in the visual cortex through inhibitory feedback
• Conducting multi-photon imaging and high-density electrophysiology experiments in anesthetized macaque visual cortex to characterize functional architecture (published in J. Neurosci., 2026)
• Investigating the neural mechanisms of visual crowding in the behaving non-human primate and artificial neural networks
• Designed and implemented data processing pipelines for high-density electrophysiology recording systems
• Mentoring graduate students and post-docs in experimental design, data analysis, and programming (MATLAB, Python)

Acting Instructor (Oct 2019 – Jan 2023)

• Revealed novel neural correlates of visual crowding, demonstrating that this perceptual phenomenon is not simply a consequence of pooled encoding but involves a competitive mechanism influenced by the relative salience of the target and its surrounding stimuli (published in J. Neurosci., 2024)
• Authored two review papers on the joint encoding of object shape and surface properties in the ventral visual pathway, and on the current understanding of primate area V4 function (published in Curr. Opin. Neurobiol., 2019; Annu. Rev. Vis. Sci., 2020)
• Upgraded the lab’s experimental control software from Python 2 to Python 3, enhancing performance and ensuring compatibility with current scientific libraries

Senior Fellow (Oct 2015 – Sep 2019)

• Devised novel metrics to quantify the perceptual qualities of natural texture images, revealed that neurons are tuned for these metrics with distinct temporal dynamics (published in J. Neurosci, 2022)
• Demonstrated that neurons in mid-level visual cortex exhibit separable but joint tuning for object shape and texture, suggesting a mechanisms for integrating these attributes durin gobject processing (published in J. Neurosci., 2019)
• Revealed distinct neural representations for object and surface motion in the primate visual cortex usin gelectrophysiological recordings and computational analysis (published in Curr. Biol., 2023)

University of California, Berkeley #

Assistant Specialist (Jan 2015 – Sep 2015)

• Designed and conducted human psychophysics experiments to demonstrate that binocular integration in the visual cortex is relatively coarse and can occur even under substantial interocular contrast differences (published in Eur. J. Neurosci., 2017)

Graduate Student Researcher (Aug 2010 – Dec 2014)

• Analyzed a database of cortical neurons to determine the degree of non-linearity of direction selectivity for cells within different laminae of the visual cortex (published in Eur. J. Neurosci., 2016)
• Investigated the effects of non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on functional tuning properties of visual cortical neurons (published in Brain Stimul., 2015)
• Conducted neurophysiological experiments to reveal segregated activity of feedforward, feedback, and horizontal pathways in visual cortex (published in Neuroscience, 2014)
• Led lab and discussion sessions for optometry students in Geometrical Optics class

Seoul National University #

Research Associate (Sep 2008 – Jun 2010)

• Studied the spatiotemporal selectivity of V1 response using Gabor stimuli that were sequentially presented with a variable stimulus onset asynchrony. Wrote Matlab code for visual stimulus generation, data acquisition, and analysis (published in PLoS One, 2012; PLoS One, 2015)

Graduate Student Researcher (Mar 2006 – Aug 2008)

• Conducted a human psychophysics study to examine the spatial localization error in visual short-term memory task (published in KCBPA, 2014)
• Led lab and discussion sessions for psychology students in Neuroscience and Biopsychology classes