Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Mentor: Alik Widge, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Dr. Jaejoong Kim starts his fellowship on July 1, 2026. Dr. Kim is our seventh MnDRIVE Neuromodulation Medicine Fellow and is completing his psychiatry residency in the physician-scientist track at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Kim is a psychiatrist and computational neuroscientist whose work focuses on integrating computational psychiatry with circuit-based neuromodulation. He received his M.D. from Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine and completed his Ph.D. in computational psychiatry at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, where he studied neurocomputational mechanisms underlying depression. He then completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology with Dr. Dean Mobbs, developing naturalistic behavioral tasks and computational models to study survival-related decision-making and brain circuits.
At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Kim’s current research focuses on identifying computational mechanisms impaired in treatment-resistant mental illnesses and determining how these mechanisms can be modulated through precise targeting of neural circuits. His ongoing projects examine how deep brain stimulation and circuit-based neuromodulation affect mental flexibility and how such modulation may improve symptoms across diagnostic categories. He is excited to join the University of Minnesota neuromodulation fellowship to strengthen his clinical training across multiple neuromodulation modalities while continuing to develop mechanism-based and closed-loop approaches for severe psychiatric disorders.
