About
Ph.D. candidate, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering · University of Pennsylvania
Hi, I'm Jeongmoon Choi. I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, working in the Patel Group. I use molecular dynamics simulations to understand how water freezes — and how nature has learned to control it.
Before Penn, I studied chemical engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul, with an exchange year at UC Berkeley. I also finished an M.S.E. in Scientific Computing at Penn alongside the Ph.D.
What I work on
- Antifreeze proteins. How do these proteins recognize ice and stop it from growing? I combine atomistic simulations with interfacial thermodynamics to find their ice-binding sites and explain why they resist being engulfed by growing ice crystals.
- Ice nucleation & ripening. I study heterogeneous ice nucleation on mineral surfaces and built a theoretical extension of classical LSW coarsening theory to explain how protein adsorption arrests Ostwald ripening of ice.
- LLM agents for molecular dynamics. I'm building MDPilot, an autonomous agent that takes natural-language research questions, sets up MD simulations, runs them, and analyzes the results — trying to lower the activation energy for computational chemistry.
About this blog
This is a place for working notes — things I figure out along the way that didn't fit in a paper. Expect short posts on simulation methods, scientific computing, AI agents for science, and the occasional longer reflection.
Selected publications
- Jang B, Amirshaghaghi A, Choi J, et al. Enhanced Accumulation and Penetration of Magnetic Nanoclusters in Tumors Using an 8-Magnet Halbach Array. ACS Nano 19(1), 2025.
- Thosar AU, Cai Y, Marks SM, Vicars Z, Choi J, Pallath A, Patel AJ. On the Engulfment of Antifreeze Proteins by Ice. PNAS 121(24), 2024.
- Vicars Z, Choi J, Marks SM, Remsing RC, Patel AJ. Interfacial Ice Density Fluctuations Inform Surface Ice-philicity. J. Phys. Chem. B 128(35), 2024.
- Ho CR, Bettinson LA, Choi J, Head-Gordon M, Bell AT. Zeolite-Catalyzed Isobutene Amination: Mechanism and Kinetics. ACS Catalysis 9(8), 2019.
For the up-to-date list, see my Google Scholar profile.