Ki Bong Lee received his BE and MS from Department of Chemical Engineering, Korea University, Korea in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and PhD from the School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, USA in 2005. He worked as a post-Doctoral research associate in Department of Chemical Engineering, Lehigh University, USA from 2006 to 2007. He was a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of Energy Research from 2008 to 2009. He has been a professor at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Korea University since 2009.
He has worked on separation technologies such as adsorption, membrane separation, solvent extraction, etc. for the application to energy and environmental fields. Particularly, he has interest in novel separation-enhanced reaction processes where separation and reaction can be carried out simultaneously in a single unit, resulting in overcoming of thermodynamic limitation and the development of compact and economical processes. His research group focused on three topics: hydrogen production, carbon dioxide capture, and heavy oil upgrading. In the hydrogen research, sorption-enhanced reaction processes, where hydrogen production reaction and by-product carbon dioxide removal by sorption are performed simultaneously, have been developed. For CO2 capture, high-temperature CO2 sorbents like hydrotalcites and double salts are newly developed and also porous carbons derived from various carbon precursors are studied for CO2 adsorption. Heavy oil upgrading studies are targeting efficient utilization of oil sand bitumen and vacuum residues. Among many upgrading processes, fast pyrolysis and solvent deasphalting processes are studied.