K.C. Huang, Ph.D.

KC Huang was an undergraduate Physics and Mathematics major at Caltech, and spent a year as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University working with Dr. Guna Rajagopal on Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of water cluster energetics. He received his PhD from MIT working with Prof. John Joannopoulos on electromagnetic flux localization in polaritonic photonic crystals and the control of melting at semiconductor surfaces using nanoscale coatings. During a short summer internship at NEC Research Labs, he became interested in self-organization in biological systems, and moved on to a postdoc with Prof. Ned Wingreen in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton working on the relationships among cell shape detection, determination, and maintenance in bacteria. His lab is currently situated in the departments of Bioengineering and Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford, and his current interests include cell division, membrane organization, cell wall biogenesis, collective motility, and the spatial organization of bacterial communities such as the gut microbiota.