LSA Graduating Seniors 2026: The Evolution of an Interest in Biology

Wonwoong Kim was walking around his high school in the Gangwon Province of South Korea when he found small beetles in the flower of a dandelion. “I got intrigued and tried to search for the name of the beetle in field guides,” he recalls. He found the name, and was surprised at the time “to know that even the tiniest bugs have their unique scientific names.”

On that day, Kim began his journey as an evolutionary biologist with an interest in insects. His interest in the natural world began much earlier, though. “I was interested in diversity of life as long as I remember. I started as a hobby fishkeeper, then a seasonal birder, and eventually found an interest in insects during high school,” Kim says.

Kim’s experience as a student majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology at LSA has helped him to deepen and broaden his knowledge. “There was a diverse array of opportunities that one could choose: interesting classes, research experiences, and intellectually stimulating environments,” he says. 

Kim will now attend the Ph.D. program in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB). He will rejoin EEB Professor L. Lacey Knowles’s lab, where he previously conducted research as an undergrad. “I am grateful to the Knowles lab members for guiding and supporting me during my undergraduate education,” Kim says. 

One highlight of his undergraduate years was Professor Dan Rabosky’s “Evolutionary Processes and Macroevolution” class (EEB 391), which “was extremely helpful in reshaping how I think about evolution, since this class covered classical theories, the history of evolutionary research and growth of thoughts, and its practical applications,” Kim says. “By learning what scientists have thought in relation to common beliefs in science in a specific time period, I was able to connect concepts in population genetics, speciation, and macroevolution that I thought were independent and reevaluate their importance.”

He appreciates that LSA requires students to take a mix of courses outside of their major and outside of their primary division. For him, that meant classes in the humanities and social sciences. A favorite was Professor Christian de Pee’s “East Asia—Early Transformations” class (History 204). “It was very influential in changing my way of thinking of how one should approach history. This course covered a lot of ‘paradoxes’ in history,” Kim says. “One of those was how contemporary societies try to link their history with people in the past, although whether those people will identify themselves in similar ways [based on] contemporary country boundaries is unclear.”

But his primary interest remains in the natural sciences, and insects in particular. Kim is well aware about common misconceptions about insects, and that many people immediately think of the kinds that are household pests. “But there are much more beneficial and interesting species,” he says. Some of his favorites are dead-wood and fungus-feeding beetles; East Asian true bugs, especially plant bugs and lace bugs; and flightless, high mountain grasshoppers. 

In addition to classwork, he has been a curational assistant at the U-M Museum of Zoology (UMMZ), where he has worked with the insect collection since February 2022. 

Kim recalls the experience of walking into the Research Museums Center near campus, where UMMZ is located. “There’s a unique aroma of the old collection, the chemicals and the proteins decomposing. I instantly become aware that I’m in the collection when I walk inside,” he says. “This collection has hundreds of thousands of historical samples. I can open the lockers and the drawers, and they’re right there.”

His work at UMMZ also helped him in the classroom, he says. “Being in the collection is a great motivation to study biology harder,” Kim says. “If you’re just learning from textbooks, you only get a vague idea. But in the collection, you can see how all these biological principles work in the real world.” 

Wonwoong Kim at work as a curational assistant at the U-M Museum of Zoology.
Photos by Natalie Condon and Tatum Poirier