Samuel was born in Texas and raised in South Korea. He graduated from Sogang University B.S. in Chemistry (summa cum laude) in 2011. He also spent a year during his undergraduate at University of Texas at Austin working with Prof. Adam Heller to develop an electroososmotic pump for drug infusion systems. He joined Seoul National University and first worked on the synthesis and application of semiconductor nanocrystals with Prof. Jin-Kyu Lee before joining Prof. Taek Dong Chung in 2015. In the Chung group, he sought fundamentals of electrochemistry and electrochemical reactions feasible on silicon oxide dielectric layer. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 and continued his first postdoc in the same group until 2022 to work on designing electroanalytical methods for organic electrosynthesis. Now, he has moved to Chapel Hill for his second postdoc in the groups of Dempsey, Miller, and Leibfarth to participate in Creativity Hub and CHASE projects