About

CV - Please download the pdf version here (December 2025)

E-mail: engiecat3.14 (at) gmail [dot] com

Hyeongkeun ‘Hugo’ Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. William P. King and Prof. Sameh H. Tawfick. Hugo is a recipient of the 2025-2026 Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship from The Grainger College of Engineering.

His research lies at the intersection of solid mechanics, additive manufacturing, and machine learning, with a focus on establishing reliable structure-property relationships in architected materials and creating robust, high-performance architected materials using experimental data-driven approach. Furthermore, with the background in both Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, Hugo is working on applying the approach for design and process optimizations in biomanufacturing applications.

Current Research

Hugo is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Intelligent Manufacturing and Thermal Systems Laboratory, and Kinetic Materials Research Group. His doctoral research, “Mechanics of Additively Manufactured Soft Lattice Structures and Architected Materials”, combines experimental mechanics with data-driven models to predict and optimize the behavior of architected materials.

His key research directions include:

• Experimental Data-Driven Mechanics: Developing Gaussian Process regressors and Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to predict the non-linear compression response of architected materials.
• Automated Metrology: Implementing custom telecentric imaging systems and digital image tracking software to capture manufacturing defects, deformations and fracture events in real-time.
• Bio-Manufacturing Automation: As part of the ARPA-H MASCOT project ($21M funding), Hugo manages the design and integration of a $4 million automated biomanufacturing system for reproducible tumor models.

Previous Experience

In 2016, Hugo joined NAVER Labs Robotics Group (currently NAVER LABS Corp.) as a research intern and developed TuskBot, a bio-inspired wheeled-robot platform that can traverse any stairs, with other interns. TuskBot had been presented in IROS 2017 and received domestic media coverage from Chosun-ilbo, SBS-CNBC, ZDNet Korea and so on.

Before NAVER LABS, Hugo had been a member of MR (Microrobot Research), a robotics club in KAIST. In the club, Hugo co-founded Team W5, a team that seeks seamless integration of robotics in biology research. BioLab-MYCO, one of their works, had been presented in the 2014 Intel Korea Year-End Press Conference, received domestic media coverage from CNET Korea (Archive) and so on, and published in Sensors as a journal article.