Dr. Im completed his PhD in 2000 at the Department of Immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science where he studied the development of antigen-specific immunotherapy to treat autoimmunity using experimental myasthenia gravis as a model. He then completed postdoctoral training in 2003 at the Harvard Medical School where his work focused on epigenetic regulation of cytokine gene expression in CD4 T cells. Dr. Im started his independent principal investigator in 2004 at the Department of Life Science in the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) and was promoted as a full professor in 2012. Since 2014, Dr. Im is a Professor in the Division of Integrative Biosciences and Biotechnology, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), KOREA. He has published > 100 articles in peer reviewed journals and has 11 patents. Currently he is the president of International Scientific Conference on Probiotics and Prebiotics (IPC) and served as a member of editor board of several journals. His main research interest is to investigate how our immune system maintains immune homeostasis by balancing between immunity and tolerance. Currently his group is actively working on probiotics to identify immune regulatory organisms for hyper-immune disorders and cancers and to elucidate the underlying mechanism of their function of the effector molecules identified from the rationally selected probiotic strains. His research provides a close link between basic science and translational approach to treat hyper-immune responses resulting in autoimmune and allergic disorders.