Luke Kim

Written By Nick Zhang

July 1, 2022
Luke Kim is a fifth-year student at Northeastern University graduating in May 2022 with his BS in chemical engineering and MS in engineering management. Scroll to read more!

Luke Kim is a fifth-year student at Northeastern University graduating in May 2022 with his BS in chemical engineering and MS in engineering management.

Luke has been a part of Galante community since September 2021. With his eagerness to learn more about the role of business in engineering, he decided to pursue his master’s degree in Engineering Management. This naturally led him to find out about Galante through some of his friends in the program as well as hearing about it around campus. After speaking with Professor Dehghani, he was quickly drawn into the program and the many opportunities it would offer. Luke’s most memorable event with Galante was the Kapreilian Grant Competition. For this event, Luke and his colleague Nick presented a simulated business proposal on a topic of their choice. The duo’s presentation reviewed effective technical information communications to non-technical stakeholders. Although challenging, this was a great experience for Luke to practice and present on a topic outside of his field for the first time, and he and Nick won second place in the competition.

While on campus, Luke devoted much of his time on lab work under Professor Yung Joon Jung at Northeastern. Professor Jung’s focus on advanced materials quickly attracted his attention, and he worked independently on research with other graduate students to develop a sensor based on advanced nano-materials. Through this experience, Luke learned important lessons such as the value of team collaboration to resolve important issues, and reading through other researchers’ papers to gather and apply their solutions on related project issues. With this experience as inspiration, Luke hopes to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering in advanced materials to further expand his knowledge and research opportunities.

Outside of school, Luke has completed three distinct and successful co-op experiences. For his first co-op, he worked at Massachusetts Materials Technologies (MMT), a small startup company at the time that focused on the development of novel technologies to measure material properties. During his time there as a chemical/mechanical engineering intern, he worked on various tasks from simple data collection to client presentations with opportunities to travel the country. At TechnipFMC – a multinational company that provides complete project life cycle services for energy and petrochemical industries – Luke completed his second co-op, joining their process engineering team where he primarily helped edit P&ID and PFD drawings that identify the processes and equipment to develop chemical production facilities. He also worked on equipment design needed for these facilities. His last co-op was at Lyra Therapeutics, a rapidly expanding biotechnology company that developed nasal implants. Here he was exposed to the operations of a small company, and spent much of his time on operational tasks such as troubleshooting equipment malfunctions and writing technical reports. Through these experiences, he acquired valuable skills first-hand, and developed his passion in the materials industry.

Within Galante, Luke has contributed by serving as storyboard coordinator, a role in which he enjoyed interviewing his Galante colleagues and learning more about their passions and plans after graduation. Utilizing the training grant fund available to him as a Galante Fellow, Luke attended the International Conference on Manufacturing Engineering and Process (ICMEP) conference in Korea where he met with researchers around the world and learned about their advanced work in chemical and mechanical engineering.

During his free time, Luke enjoys runs around Jamaica Pond and traveling. Upon graduation, he is excited to begin a full-time role as Process Engineer at Axcelis Technologies, a company that designs and manufacturers capital equipment for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. For incoming and prospective Galante fellows, Luke suggests experimenting with different opportunities and experiences, as some can only be identified and attained when committing oneself to exploration and actively participating in various events.

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