Prof Hyun Koo Kim is a professor and the chief of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at Korea University Guro Hospital. He is a specialist and a pioneer in the field of minimally invasive image-guided surgery and robotic thoracic surgery. He is one of the pioneers of the single-port VATS and robotic lung cancer surgery using a robotic endostapler. He was the first to perform the two-port approach in RATS and single-port RATS using the da Vinci SP system for thymic, pulmonary, and esophageal surgeries. He is the first Korean to receive the Grillo Award from the European Society of Thoracic Surgery in 2015 and the Techno-college Award from the European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery in 2023. He has published many research papers, such as in ACS Appl Mater Interfaces (2025), J control Relsease (2025), International Journal of Surgery (2024, 2024, 2024), Biomater Sci (2024), Advanced Healthcare Materials (2023), JAMA Surgery (2020), and Annals of Surgery (2021), focusing on developing lung cancer-targeted molecular fluorescence contrast agents and fluorescence imaging systems for more accurate and minimally invasive resection of lung cancer. Recently, he has been researching blood-derived exosomes for non-invasive early diagnosis of lung cancer, publishing numerous papers in journals such as Small (2024), Nature Communications (2023), ACS Sens (2023) and ACS NANO (2020).