Jiwoo Han is a Ph.D. student in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the University of Iowa, where she holds the Dean’s Graduate Engineering Fellowship. She is passionate about utilizing microbial genetic engineering for sustainable biomaterial production. Her research interests focus on engineering microbes to produce bacterial cellulose and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) as eco-friendly alternatives to conventional materials. Jiwoo earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biological Engineering from Konkuk University. As an undergraduate, she studied genetic engineering using methylotrophic bacteria, and during her master’s research, she developed novel deep eutectic solvents (DES) for enzyme stabilization and synthesized carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) from waste biomass-derived cellulose for biological applications. She is now expanding her expertise in synthetic and metabolic engineering to develop microbial platforms in combination with biochemical engineering, ultimately contributing to sustainable biomaterial solutions.