Jun Ho Son and the Useful Trouble With Light

Gold usually makes its entrance as a sign of wealth. In Jun Ho Son’s work, it has a less glamorous assignment: getting warm on command. A thin layer of the metal, illuminated by an LED, became part of a Berkeley experiment in rapid temperature control. The arrangement sounds modest. Its consequences occupied a scientific paper, helped supply the foundation for a company, and kept Son working on the stubborn details of light, heat and small structures for years afterward.

Son co-founded Kryptos Biotechnologies with Jinyong Lee in 2017. Based in Hayward, California, he has carried a materials scientist’s training into the work of building instruments. His story has a useful earlier chapter, however. Before the company and the gold film, there was a silver electrode, a question about stability, and an award for making LEDs work better.

The light had a previous job

In December 2010, Son was among the POSTECH researchers recognized for conference work. He received the Korean Vacuum Society’s Young Vacuum Scientist Award. Working under Professor Jong-Lam Lee, he had investigated a silver-based electrode and devised a nickel/silver multilayer structure that improved stability. The practical aim was to enhance LED brightness and lifespan.

An electrode is easy to overlook. It lacks the cheerful visibility of the light it helps produce. Yet a device’s performance depends on such interfaces, where one material meets another and the conditions become inconvenient. Son’s award recognized work at precisely that level. An improvement to a layer could matter to the behavior of the whole object.

He completed his doctorate in materials science and engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology in 2010, following undergraduate study there. His research training put metals, surfaces and optical devices within the same field of view. That combination would travel well. In the next chapter of his career, light would be recruited to perform a different task.

The early award offers a concrete starting point for a profile of Son. It catches him before the founder title, working on a component with a measurable problem. The reader can see the material, the proposed structure and the intended improvement. There is a person’s career inside those technical nouns.

Berkeley, a gold film, and a switch

Son’s Berkeley research profile dates his postdoctoral appointment to December 2011. He worked in Luke P. Lee’s laboratory and later as an assistant project scientist. By July 2015, he was lead author of Ultrafast photonic PCR, with Byungrae Cho, SoonGweon Hong, Sang Hun Lee, Ori Hoxha, Amanda J. Haack and Lee. Seven names belonged to the work.

The experiment used blue LEDs beneath a plastic chip carrying a gold film. The film was 120 nanometers thick. Light interacting with the metal produced heat, allowing the team to change the temperature of a small liquid sample rapidly. Turning the illumination on and off provided a way to control the heating. The system completed 30 thermal cycles in less than five minutes.

In this arrangement, the LED’s ordinary role as a source of visible light became the start of an energy-transfer process. A familiar component met a carefully chosen surface. The interest lay in what happened between them.

Son also supplied a schematic used to explain the research. There is something fitting about that small credit. The researcher helped make the system work and helped make its workings visible. A diagram asks for another kind of precision: which parts must a reader see to understand the result?

Silver changes the color

Son’s scientific record also contains a 2016 study of organic light-emitting diodes. His co-authors included Illhwan Lee, Jae Yong Park, Kihyon Hong, Sungjun Kim and Jong-Lam Lee. Here the metal was silver, arranged as nano-dots. The researchers examined how changing their size and spacing affected the color of the emitted light.

The study described an interaction between light and electrons near the silver’s surface. As the nano-dots grew, the emission shifted from cyan toward yellow-green. The team used optical measurements and simulations to investigate the effect. Geometry at a very small scale influenced something a person could see.

Set beside the Berkeley gold-film work, the OLED study makes an illuminating pair. One concerns emitted color; the other concerns generated heat. Both involve light meeting a metal structure, and both require attention to the dimensions of that structure. The connection is visible in the work itself, without needing a grand theory of Son’s personality.

It also widens the picture of his scientific career. A founder’s company can become the only fact attached to his name. Son’s publications retain the earlier range: devices that emit light, surfaces that interact with it, and thin structures whose properties change what the system can do. Materials science supplies the continuity.

2017: the experiment gets a company

In 2017, Son and Jinyong Lee co-founded Kryptos. The company grew from discoveries made during Son’s work in Luke Lee’s Berkeley laboratory. University research now had an organizational home beyond the laboratory, with the accompanying work of licensing, development and financing.

The dates resist the compressed version of entrepreneurship in which a discovery appears and a startup promptly follows. Son’s doctorate came in 2010, his Berkeley appointment in 2011, the photonic paper in 2015 and the company in 2017. Each belongs to a different stage of the same professional journey.

Kryptos’s subsequent announcements included a $2.7 million financing round in 2019 and a $10 million Series A in 2024. Those are company milestones. Alongside them, Son’s inventor credits provide a more detailed account of the engineering that continued after incorporation. The company had a financial history; its technical work had one too.

The founder partnership connects two people to the undertaking. Son’s Berkeley chapter supplies the scientific origin, while the company’s later statements identify Lee as chief executive and Son as chief technology officer. That division gives Son’s story a clear center: the invention and the continued effort to turn its principles into working hardware.

Heat needs an address

A 2023 patent names Austin So and Son on a method for localized heating through patterned thin films. Its design places multiple separate light-absorbing regions along an interior surface of a reaction chamber. An energy source directs light toward one or more regions, producing heat that reaches the solution inside.

The arrangement makes location part of temperature control. The film has a pattern; the illumination has a destination. For a reader looking through Son’s career, this is a tangible continuation of the earlier work. Light and material remain the actors, but the stage has acquired more carefully defined geometry.

Another patent, granted in February 2024, names the same two inventors on temperature monitoring. It describes a first chamber and a second chamber, with light-absorbing regions and a temperature sensor in the second. Heating and knowing the temperature are connected engineering problems. A useful system must do both.

These designs place Son within collaborative invention. So’s name accompanies his on the heating and monitoring work. The patent titles are lengthy, as patent titles tend to be, but the objects are approachable: chambers, surfaces, illumination and a sensor. The paperwork preserves decisions about where energy goes and how its effects are measured.

That is a different scale of detail from a funding announcement. It allows the reader to follow what the founder kept making. The initial idea gains chambers, patterns and feedback. Progress becomes a sequence of physical arrangements.

Four demands in one sentence

In January 2025, Son described the demands facing Kryptos’s technology with four terms: speed, accuracy, cost-efficiency and portability. The company announcement identified him as chief technology officer and principal investigator of a development project. His language brought the engineering back to the performance of a complete instrument.

“Speed, accuracy, cost-efficiency, and portability.”Jun Ho Son · January 2025

Those words make a compact brief. They ask how quickly a system operates, how dependable its output is, what it costs and where it can go. They also explain why a thin film belongs in a company story. Its properties matter through the larger device that contains it.

The original laboratory result has to live among these demands. Son’s move into a technical leadership role places his research within that wider set of considerations. The component, the chamber and the instrument must belong to the same design.

The wells get smaller; the work continues

On March 10, 2026, a US patent was granted for a microfluidic reaction vessel array with patterned films. It names Son and Luc Bousse as inventors and Kryptos as assignee. The design brings light-absorbing films into an arrangement of small wells and fluidic channels, allowing samples within the wells to undergo thermal cycling.

The array adds another chapter to Son’s record of shared invention. Separate regions and small chambers recur, now within a network that also has to accommodate moving fluid. A gold-film experiment has been followed by years of work on the structures around heating: where the sample sits, where light arrives and how the system is organized.

Son’s career can be followed through those objects. At POSTECH, a multilayer electrode helped address LED stability. At Berkeley, LED illumination met a thin gold film. At Kryptos, patterned surfaces became part of chambers and arrays. Light has kept finding new work. Son has kept working on the materials that give it something useful to do.