Park Chanhum, 박찬흠

From taekwondo and football to the metabolic question.

Seoul Scholars International, Class of 2029

Taekwondo, 4th dan Football, team discipline Jiu-jitsu, competition mindset Volleyball, school varsity

Me seated with a medal after a taekwondo ceremony — Observe. Adjust. Try again.

Me with my football team — Football turns performance into community.

Me wearing a medal at a jiu-jitsu competition — Competition is where the question became mine.

Me on a school football field — Football builds team discipline.

Me at a jiu-jitsu competition venue — Stay with the fundamentals.

My portfolio, about how long-term training, team play, nutrition and measurement meet in one precise question, and the single study I am running to answer it.

Where the question started.

Ten years of training, and one scale.

I started taekwondo at six, played football on Saturdays, then moved to jiu-jitsu. At school I play on the varsity volleyball team. My research question did not arrive in a classroom. It arrived at a competition weigh-in.

Chapter one

Taekwondo, from age six.

Ten years of grading, form and repetition, ending in my fourth dan. This is where I built the habit of returning to fundamentals, long before I applied it to an experiment.

Me performing a taekwondo form as a yellow belt at a grading — Me as a yellow belt, holding a form at a grading.

Me folding my dobok at home beside a stack of belts — Folding my dobok at home, next to the belts I had already earned.

Tying my belt at home before training.

Receiving my new belt at a grading.

Our group poomsae demonstration at the Kukkiwon, World Taekwondo Headquarters.

My fourth dan, earned across roughly ten years of continuous practice.

Chapter two

Football, every Saturday.

Taekwondo is measured alone. Football is measured together. Weekly matches since 2022 added spacing, timing and shared responsibility to a discipline I had only practiced by myself.

Me on the pitch during a football session

The pitch taught me a different kind of attention.

I can drill a form until it is correct. I cannot drill a match. The variable is other people, and the only way I learned to read it was repetition under real conditions.

4years of weekly Saturday matches I have played

Cone drills at one of my football sessions.

Chapter three

Jiu-jitsu, and the scale.

To make the lower weight class I cut from 66.5 kg to 58.5 kg. Artificially sweetened drinks held my hunger down. My recovery between sessions felt slower. That observation is where my whole research question started.

Me at the weigh-in of a jiu-jitsu competition, standing on the scale

A weigh-in is a measurement. So is a question.

The scale gave me one number and no explanation. Was my slower recovery the calorie deficit, the dehydration, my own expectation, or the sweeteners themselves? Separating those four is exactly what my current experiment is designed to do.

8kilograms I cut to reach the lower weight class

Competitors lining up before jiu-jitsu matches — Lining up before my matches.

Me in my gi at the Seoul Open venue — Me in my gi at the competition venue.

Me on the third place podium at the Seoul Open 2025 Street Jiu-Jitsu Championship — Third place, Seoul Open 2025 Street Jiu-Jitsu Championship.

Me on the podium at the Seoul Open 2025 Street Jiu-Jitsu Championship — On the podium at the Seoul Open 2025.

Photographs and videos from my family archive. Competition result: third place, Seoul Open 2025 Street Jiu-Jitsu Championship.

Explore what is taking shape.

One question, one study, and the conference that wants to hear it.

My central question sits at the intersection of sports nutrition, exercise physiology and metabolism.

Signature question

Can repeated non-nutritive sweetener intake change metabolic recovery after high-intensity exercise?

My research begins with something I noticed while cutting weight and training, then turns that observation into a testable biological question.

Research question01 / 06

Research question

One study, and the habit of checking my own work.

I am running one study, not three. My design separates the human question from the model I can actually test in a student laboratory.

Harvard Science Research Conference

Accepted and registered, with the question rather than a result.

I am presenting the sweetener study before the data exists, so the design gets argued with while I can still change it.

My research, running now

Can chronic artificial sweetener exposure change growth, exercise performance and recovery?

Control against saccharin and sucralose in one system. Development, climbing performance, fatigue and recovery at 0, 15, 30 and 60 minutes, with the vial as the analysis unit.

Jiu-jitsu competition scoreboard showing my name

Earlier, finished

A phone-camera screen for food-surface residue, and an audit of my own tool.

Reframing the same specimen moved it two full grades. I reported that rather than hiding it. It is not what I am working on now.

Measurement and evidence

Make the invisible measurable.

Across my projects the recurring move is the same: I define a proxy, control the conditions and audit how easily the measurement can drift.

The earlier tool taught me to audit my own measurement.

Four hand-defined optical features, tonal darkness, colour patchiness, surface texture and specular sheen, are combined into a 0 to 100 score. I then test whether the score changes when I reframe, resize or relight the image.

2full grade shift when the same specimen is framed differently

Good experiments make their limits visible.

My sweetener study does not claim to measure human insulin resistance directly. Drosophila is a controlled system for testing one part of a larger metabolic question, and the draft says plainly that no measured values exist yet.

3recovery checkpoints after exercise, at 15, 30 and 60 minutes

Me with a medal at a jiu-jitsu competition — Jiu-jitsu competition

A jiu-jitsu match in progress — Match in progress

Research communication

Explain the question so other people can improve it.

The Harvard Science Research Conference accepted me. I go there to defend an idea, hear a better one and change the design when the evidence demands it.

1

Start from lived experience

My training and weight cutting made the question specific rather than abstract.

2

Separate the model from the claim

My experiment can test a mechanism without pretending to reproduce the whole human body.

3

Invite correction

I do not want to keep an idea personally mine. I want the explanation to become more collectively true.

4

Return to fundamentals

Jiu-jitsu gave me a working method: when a result fails, I go back to the basic detail I assumed too quickly.

Away from the desk

The same habit shows up outside research: practice, watch it back, change one thing. A football match on our school pitch, and three moments from our team demonstration at the Kukkiwon.

A football match on our school pitch.

Our team mid-form on the Kukkiwon floor.

The middle section of the form, facing the judges.

The kicking section near the end of the form.

The next experiment

Quick wins. All year.

My immediate work is to turn a strong question into clean data, then turn clean data into leadership and outside validation.

Build the evidence.

I choose one research spine, collect real measurements and raise the academic rigor around it.

AP Biology, then AP Chemistry and AP Statistics
Run my sweetener study with a documented control design
Move from participation to a teaching or demonstration role
Present the study at the Harvard Science Research Conference, then take it to the Korea Science and Engineering Fair

And so much more.

The same discipline travels across contexts.

Sport, research and school are not separate identities for me. They are different places to practice attention, repetition and adjustment.

Taekwondo

My fourth dan, built over years.

Training since I was six gives my research a physical baseline: repetition, control, recovery and the patience to keep improving.

4taekwondo dan rank I earned through long-term practice

Football

The field makes my performance collective.

Football adds communication, spacing and shared responsibility to the discipline I built on my own.

1field where my discipline becomes shared action

Research identity

One question can organize many projects.

My strongest direction is not Biology or Computer Science in the abstract. It is nutrition and exercise physiology meeting measurement.

1question I intend to carry forward

Great questions come with great controls.

Precision is a form of honesty.

Every project I run needs a boundary around what it can and cannot say.

Control the design.

Every group gets the same temperature, humidity, light cycle, medium volume and starting count. Only the sweetener changes. Vial positions are randomised daily and climbing videos are scored under codes that hide the group.

Fix the rules before the data.

The analysis unit, the statistical tests and the recovery checkpoints are written down before collection starts, so the numbers cannot be chosen after the fact. A study becomes more credible when its limits are part of the result.

Experience the next chapter.

Find the major that can hold the whole question.

I am aiming at Nutritional Sciences and Kinesiology or Exercise Science rather than a generic Biology label, because my research and my own experience meet there.

Cornell UniversityCollege of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Nutritional Sciences

University of MichiganSchool of Kinesiology, Movement Science

University of Wisconsin MadisonCollege of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Nutritional Sciences

University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignFood Science and Human Nutrition

The University of Texas at AustinKinesiology and Health, Exercise Science

Purdue UniversityNutrition, Fitness and Health

Pennsylvania State UniversityCollege of Health and Human Development, Kinesiology and Nutritional Sciences

The Ohio State UniversityHealth Promotion, Nutrition and Exercise Science

University of PittsburghSports Medicine and Nutrition

Arizona State University, BarrettNutritional Science

Indiana University BloomingtonKinesiology, Exercise Science

University of Illinois ChicagoNutrition Science or Kinesiology

Compatible with the right next steps.

A research spine that can grow.

Data, communication and leadership are the next pieces that will turn my early curiosity into a body of work I own.

Build the dataset.

I need to collect the actual measurements for my sweetener study. My question is already strong. My next threshold is evidence.

Build the role.

I need to move from taking part into teaching, demonstrating, leading a team and making a research contribution other people can use.