Ha was born in
Seoul, South Korea on February 20, 1968. He received a B.S. degree in physics at
Seoul National University in 1990, and joined the physics department at
University of California, Berkeley where he began to study
atomic physics in the lab of
Raymond Jeanloz in Berkeley's geophysics department. He worked on a project to place
nitrogen and
carbon under very high pressures, with the goal to create a material harder than diamonds. During this time, he had to take a temporary leave of absence from Berkeley to South Korea for a year to fulfill South Korea's military service requirements. Upon his return, Ha changed his research interests and joined the lab of Daniel Chemla, a prominent scientist known for his studies of quantum optics of semiconductors. Soon after joining Chemla's group, Ha began working closely with scientist Shimon Weiss to build a
near-field scanning optical microscope, a machine equipped with a small aperture and a short-pulse laser able to measure a material's properties with high time and spatial resolution. He subsequently received both his M.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley and completed postdoctoral research at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
Stanford University with advisor
Steven Chu. He was appointed to the faculty of the
University of Illinois in 2000 as assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Center for
Biophysics and
Computational Biology. In July 2015, it was announced that Ha would move to
Johns Hopkins University as a
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program was established in 2013, by a gift from
Michael Bloomberg to recruit faculty with considerable accomplishments as interdisciplinary researchers and in excellence in teaching. Ha holds joint appointments in the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, the
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences's Department of Biophysics, the
Whiting School of Engineering's Department of
Biomedical Engineering. Through the
Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship, Ha will be teaching a new undergraduate interdisciplinary biophysics course and will be engaged in the university's Individualized Health Initiative.
Honors and Distinctions Ha has been recognized internationally for his pioneering work in biophysics. In 2001, he was named a
Searle Scholar, recognizing him as an "exceptional young scientist." and an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow for "outstanding promise." In 2005, Ha was elected to the
American Physical Society and was named an Investigator of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the scientific disciplines of
Biophysics and
Structural Biology, a position he continues to hold today. He received the
Michael and Kate Bárány Award of the
Biophysical Society in 2007 for "his development and application of novel single molecule physical methods and techniques, and for his ground-breaking discoveries in the single molecule research field." In 2011, Ha won the
Ho-Am Prize in Science for his "pioneering application of fluorescence resonance energy transfer techniques to reveal the behavior and physical characteristics of single biomolecules"; this prize is "widely regarded as the Korean equivalent of the Nobel Prizes." He was named the 2012 Scientist of the Year by the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA) and Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies (KOFST). In 2015, Taekjip Ha was elected to both the
National Academy of Sciences and
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2021, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine. ==Research==