Department+of+Physics
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KAIST Professors Selected as Y-KAST Members
Professor YongKeun Park, Professor Bumjoon Kim, Professor Keon Jae Lee, and Professor Young Seok Ju were selected as the newest members of the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology (Y-KAST).
The Korean Academy of Science and Technology, an academic institution of professional experts, selected 26 promising scientists under the age of 43 to join Y-KAST. and four KAIST professors were included in the list.
The newest members were conferred on February 26.
Research Field
Name
Natural Sciences
YongKeun Park (Dept. of Physics)
Engineering
Bumjoon Kim (Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Agricultural & Fishery Sciences
Keon Jae Lee (Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering)
Medical Sciences
Young Seok Ju (Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering)
2018.03.05 View 7891 -
KAIST Students Invited to the BNL
Siheon Ryee and Taek Jung Kim, combined Masters and PhD students from the Department of Physics, have been invited to be visiting researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
The BNL, located in Long Island, New York, is one of the most esteemed institutes in the United States. Ryee and Kim received the invitation from the Center for Computational Design of Functional Strongly Correlated Materials and Theoretical Spectroscopy. This center was established by scholars who have been leading this field in the United States.
The two students will be participating in developing a methodology and code for calculating strongly correlated electronic materials, and a grant of 40,000 USD will be provided to each student. This amount of support is not often awarded to researchers outside of postdoctoral programs.
Moreover, they are guaranteed to continue their combined Masters and PhD program and write their dissertations under the supervision of their advisor, Professor Myung Joon Han from the Department of Physics.
Professor Han said, “I was impressed by how well-known scholars established the center in order to cooperate with each other to solve challenging problems. Also, I was surprised and happy that my students were invited to this outstanding institute.”
“I believe that doing research with leaders in their field will give valuable experience to the students. At the same time, my students will be a great help to the scholars of the institute,” he added.
2018.01.11 View 6605 -
Meet the KAISTian of 2017, Professor YongKeun Park
Professor YongKeun Park from the Department of Physics is one of the star professors in KAIST. Rising to the academic stardom, Professor Park’s daily schedule is filled with series of business meetings in addition to lab meetings and lectures.
The year 2017 must have been special for him. During the year, he published numerous papers in international journals, such as Nature Photonics, Nature Communications and Science Advances. These high performances drew international attention from renowned media, including Newsweek and Forbes. Moreover, recognizing his research performance, he was elected as a fellow member of the Optical Society (OSA) in his mid-30s. Noting that the members’ age ranges from late 50s to early 60s, Professor Park’s case considered to be quite exceptional.
Adding to his academic achievement, he has launched two startups powered of his own technologies. One is called Tomocube, a company specialized in 3-D imaging microscope using holotomography technology. His company is currently exporting the products to multiple countries, including the United States and Japan. The other one is The.Wave.Talk which has technologies for examining pre-existing bacteria anywhere and anytime.
His research career and entrepreneurship are well deserved recipient of many honors. At the 2018 kick-off ceremony, Professor Park was awarded the KAISTian of 2017 in recognition of his developing holographic measure and control technology as well as founding a new field for technology application.
KAISTian of the Year, first presented in 2001, is an award to recognize the achievements and exemplary contribution of KAIST member who has put significant effort nationally and internationally, enhancing the value of KAIST.
While receiving the award, he thanked his colleagues and his students who have achieved this far together. He said, “I would like to thank KAIST for providing environment for young professors like me so that we can engage themselves in research. Also, I would like to mention that I am an idea seeder and my students do the most of the research. So, I appreciate my students for their hard works, and it is very pleasure to have them. Lastly, I thank the professors for teaching these outstanding students. I feel great responsibility over this title. I will dedicate myself to make further progress in commercializing technology in KAIST.”
Expecting his successful startup cases as a model and great inspiration to students as well as professors, KAIST interviewed Professor Park.
Q What made you decide to found your startups?
A I believed that my research areas could be further used. As a professor, I believe that it is a university’s role to create added value through commercializing technology and creating startups.
Q You have co-founded two startups. What is your role in each company?
A So, basically I have two full-time jobs, professor in KAIST and CTO in Tomocube. After transferring the technology, I hold the position of advisor in The.Wave.Talk.
(Holographic images captured by the product Professor Park developed)
Q Do your students also participate in your companies or can they?
A No, the school and companies are separate spaces; in other words, they are not participating in my companies. They have trained my employees when transferring the technologies, but they are not directly working for the companies.
However, they can participate if they want to. If there’s a need to develop a certain technology, an industry-academia contract can be made. According to the agreement, students can work for the companies.
Q Were there any hardships when preparing the startups?
A At the initial stage, I did not have a financial problem, thanks to support from Startup KAIST. Yet, inviting capital is the beginning, and I think every step I made to operate, generate revenue, and so on is not easy.
Q Do you believe KAIST is startup-friendly?
A Yes, there’s no school like KAIST in Korea and any other country. Besides various programs to support startup activities, Startup KAIST has many professors equipped with a great deal of experience. Therefore, I believe that KAIST provides an excellent environment for both students and professors to create startups.
Q Do you have any suggestion to KAIST institutionally?
A Well, I would like to make a comment to students and professors in KAIST. I strongly recommend them to challenge themselves by launching startups if they have good ideas. Many students wish to begin their jobs in government-funded research institutes or major corporates, but I believe that engaging in a startup company will also give them valuable and very productive experience.
Unlike before, startup institutions are well established, so attracting good capital is not so hard. There are various activities offered by Startup KAIST, so it’s worthwhile giving it a try.
Q What is your goal for 2018 as a professor and entrepreneur?
A I don’t have a grand plan, but I will work harder to produce good students with new topics in KAIST while adding power to my companies to grow bigger.
By Se Yi Kim from the PR Office
2018.01.03 View 9866 -
Professor YongKeun Park Elected as a Fellow of the Optical Society
Professor YongKeun Park, from the Department of Physics at KAIST, was elected as a fellow member of the Optical Society (OSA) in Washington, D.C. on September 12. Fellow membership is given to members who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of optics and photonics.
Professor Park was recognized for his research on digital holography and wavefront control technology.
Professor Park has been producing outstanding research outcomes in the field of holographic technology and light scattering control since joining KAIST in 2010. In particular, he developed and commercialized technology for a holographic telescope. He applied it to various medical and biological research projects, leading the field worldwide.
In the past, cells needed to be dyed with fluorescent materials to capture a 3-D image. However, Professor Park’s holotomography (HT) technology can capture 3-D images of living cells and tissues in real time without color dyeing. This technology allows diversified research in the biological and medical field.
Professor Park established a company, Tomocube, Inc. in 2015 to commercialize the technology. In 2016, he received funding from SoftBank Ventures and Hanmi Pharmaceutical. Currently, major institutes, including MIT, the University of Pittsburgh, the German Cancer Research Center, and Seoul National University Hospital are using his equipment.
Recently, Professor Park and his team developed technology based on light scattering measurements. With this technology, they established a company called The Wave Talk and received funding from various organizations, such as NAVER. Its first product is about to be released.
Professor Park said, “I am glad to become a fellow member based on the research outcomes I produced since I was appointed as a professor at KAIST. I would like to thank the excellent researchers as well as the school for its support. I will devote myself to continuously producing novel outcomes in both basic and applied fields.”
Professor Park has published nearly 100 papers in renowned journals including Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Physical Review Letters.
2017.10.18 View 10120 -
A KAIST Alumnus Receives the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships
Dr. Je-Kyung Ryu, a graduate of the Physics Department at KAIST in 2014, received the 2017 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship.
Established in 1996, the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships support young scientists in or outside Europe to help them grow as independent researchers. The recipients are recognized to have the highest potential to make a difference in science and technology and work on research and innovation.
Dr. Ryu is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Cees Dekker Lab in the Department of Bionanoscience at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands.
He was among six international researchers at TU Delft who were awarded this research grant.
The grant of 177,000 euros will be offered for two years from March 2017 to February 2019 to cover his salary and research expenses.
For a news article published by TU Delft on the award, please click below:
QN and BN Successfully Attract Young Scientific Talent
February 1, 2017
2017.02.22 View 6207 -
Dr. Sung-Chul Shin Selected 16th President of KAIST
(President Sung-Chul Shin)
The KAIST Board of Trustees elected Professor Sung-Chul Shin of the Department of Physics the 16th president of KAIST on February 21. Professor Shin succeeds President Sung-Mo Kang whose four-year term will end on February 23. He is the first KAIST alumnus to serve as its president.
The Board of Trustees announced, “We believe that Professor Shin’s scientific achievement, outstanding leadership, and clear vision will serve KAIST faculty, students, and staff very well. He will be the best person to help KAIST leap forward in the four years ahead.”
The newly-elected president said, “I am humbled and honored to have been elected to lead such a prestigious institute of Korea. Aiming to be one of the top ten global universities, KAIST will continue to innovate its systems.” Previously, Dr. Shin led the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) for six years as president since 2011.
Professor Shin joined the KAIST faculty in 1989. He graduated from Seoul National University and then earned his MS degree in condensed matter physics at KAIST in 1977. After earning his Ph.D. in material physics at Northwestern University in 1984, he worked at Eastman Kodak Research Labs as a senior research scientist for five years.
Before heading to DGIST, President Shin held key administrative positions at KAIST from the early 1990s including dean of planning, dean of the international office, and vice-dean of student affairs. During President Robert Laughlin’s tenure, the first foreign president at KAIST, he served as vice-president for two years from 2004. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology of the Korean government as vice chairperson from 2015 to 2016.
A renowned scholar in the field of nanoscience, President Shin’s research focuses on the artificial synthesis and characterization of nonmagnetic materials, magnetic anisotropy, and magneto-optical phenomena. He leads the Laboratory for Nanospinics of Spintronic Materials at KAIST and has published in 290 journals while holding 37 patents.
A fellow in the American Physical Society (APS) since 2008, he was the president of the Korean Physical Society from 2011 to 2012. He has been on the editorial board of J. Magnetism and Magnetic Materials from 2009 and was the first Korean recipient of the Asian Union of Magnetics Societies (AUMS) Award, which recognizes outstanding scientists in the field of magnetics.
President Shin envisions making KAIST’s research and education more competitive through continuing innovation. His innovation efforts will extend to the five key areas of education, research, technology commercialization, globalization, and future planning.
Among his priorities, he emphasizes multidisciplinary studies and leadership training for students. He plans to focus on undeclared major courses for undergraduates to help them expand their experience and exposure to diverse disciplines. This approach will help create well-rounded engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs by enabling them to develop skills while leveraging a strong connection to the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
To better respond to Industry 4.0, which calls for convergence studies and collaborative work, he proposed establishing a ‘Convergence Innovation System’ by strategically selecting 10 flagship convergence research groups. In order to accelerate the technology commercialization and ecosystem of start-ups, he will strengthen entrepreneurship education, making it a prerequisite requirement for students. President Shin said he will spare no effort to incubate and spin-off ventures in which KAIST technology is being transferred. For globalization efforts, he plans to increase the ratio of foreign faculty from 9 percent to 15 percent, while doubling the current foreign student enrollment ratio of 5 percent. For future strategic innovation, he will implement a long-term innovation strategic plan dubbed ‘Vision 2031.’
2017.02.22 View 9311 -
Nobel Laureate Dr. John Michael Kosterlitz Speaks at KAIST
KAIST’s Department of Physics will invite one of three co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016, Professor John Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, on January 9, 2017, to speak about the exotic states of matter, which is entitled “Topological Defects and Phase Transitions.”
Professor Kosterlitz shares the Nobel award with two other researchers, David Thouless and Duncan Haldane. He is considered one of the pioneers in the field of topological phases. In the early 1970s, along with Thouless, he demonstrated that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and explained the mechanism behind, phase transition, that makes superconductivity disappear at higher temperatures.
Over the last decade, topological materials and their applications have been widely studied with the hope of using them in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers. Details of the lecture follow below:
Distinguished Lecture Series by KAIST’s Physics Department
· Speaker: Professor John Michael Kosterlitz of the Physics Department,
Brown University
· Topic: “Topological Defects and Phase Transitions”
· Date: January 9, 2017, 4:00 PM
· Place: Lecture Hall (#1501), College of Natural Sciences (E6-2)
2017.01.06 View 6322 -
Dr. Ryu of KAIST Receives the S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award
Dr. Je-Kyung Ryu of KAIST’s Department of Physics has been awarded the S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award for his doctoral dissertation’s originality and applicability.
Professor Tae-Young Yoon of Physics is his doctoral advisor.
The award ceremony took place on November 25, 2015 at the Press Center in Seoul.
This S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award, jointly sponsored by the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) and the Scholastic University Presidential Association, was established to foster young talented scientists in basic science and to advance the field.
The award is given every other year for each of the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, and earth sciences.
With the award, Dr. Ryu received a research grant of USD 8,600.
He discovered, for the first time in the world, how NSF (N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor), a protein involved in a vesicular transport in cellular activities, disassembles a SNARE (soluble NSF attachment protein receptor) complex, using a unimolecular biophysics method.
Unlike the existing studies, he proposed a model in which NSF disassembles SNARE complexes at one step, and as a result, provided evidence of how the SNARE complex influenced the fusion of biological membranes.
His research was published in the scientific journal Science issued on March 27, 2015. The title of the paper is “Spring-loaded Unraveling of a Single SNARE Complex by NSF in One Round of ATP Turnover.”
2015.11.27 View 7701 -
Dr. Se-Jung Kim Receives the Grand Prize at the International Photo and Image Contest on Light
Dr. Se-Jung Kim of the Physics Department at KAIST received the Grand Prize at the 2015 Photo and Image Contest of the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.
The United Nations has designated the year 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.
The Optical Society of Korea celebrated the UN’s designation by hosting an international photo and image contest on the theme of light and optics related technology.
Dr. Kim presented a photo of images taken from a liquid crystal, which was entitled “A Micro Pinwheel.” She took pictures of liquid crystal images with a polarizing microscope and then colored the pictures. The liquid crystal has self-assembled circle domain structures, and each domain can form vortex optics. Her adviser for the project is Professor Yong-Hoon Cho of the Physics Department.
Her work was exhibited during the annual conference of the Optical Society of Korea, which was held on July 13-15, 2015 at Gyeong-Ju Hwabaek International Convention Center. It will also be exhibited at the National Science Museum in Gwacheon and the Kim Dae-Jung Convention Center in Gwangju.
Picture: A Micro Pinwheel
2015.07.31 View 8526 -
News Article on the Development of Synthesis Process for Graphene Quantum Dots
Before It's News, an international online news agency, highlighted the recent research conducted by KAIST professors (Seokwoo Jeon of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Yong-Hoon Cho of the Department of Physics, and Seunghyup Yoo of the Department of Electrical Engineering) on the development of synthesis process for graphene quantum dots, nanometer-sized round semiconductor nanoparticles that are very efficient at emitting photons. If commercialized, this synthetic technology will lead the way to the development of paper-thin displays in the future.
For the article, please go to the link below:
Before It’s News, September 3, 2014“Graphene quantum dots prove highly efficient in emitting light”
http://beforeitsnews.com/science-and-technology/2014/09/graphene-quantum-dots-prove-highly-efficient-in-emitting-light-2718190.html
2014.09.07 View 11635 -
Professor Yong-Hee Lee of Physics Received the Humboldt Research Award
In recognition of his past accomplishments in research and teaching, Professor Yong-Hee Lee of Physics at KAIST received the Humboldt Research Award in November 2013. The Humboldt Research Award is annually given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to internationally renowned scientists and scholars in the fields of biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, linguistics, management, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and physics. The winners of the award are offered with 60,000 Euros of research grant as well as an opportunity to undertake prolonged periods of research in collaboration with researchers in Germany.Professor Lee, who may be the first Korean physicist receiving the award, plans to conduct joint research with colleagues at the Technical University of Berlin and University of Würzburg.
2014.01.05 View 7898 -
Nanoparticle based Super Lens selected as 2013 Science and Technology News
Professor Yong-keun Park
"Nanoparticle-based Super Lens", an article by KAIST Physics Department’s Professor Yong-keun Park and Professor Yong-hoon Cho’s joint research team, has been selected as one of the ten representative 2013 Science and Technology News, by the Korea Federation of Science and Technology Societies.
This new concept super lens uses the scattering of light, which can yield over three times more superior resolution of previous optical lenses.
Unlike the conventional optical lens that utilizes refraction of the light, the super lens can give the image of viruses and structure within the cell at 100㎚. This lens is also applicable to state-of-the-art optical and semiconductor processes.
In addition, this year's research achievements also include the successful launch of Naro, a new technology to remove the brain cell membrane which gives a more transparent view of the brain, a new drug to inhibit cancer metastasis, as well as the development of ultra-wide-angle insect eye camera technology.
Articles for 2013 Science and Technology News are chosen in three trial reviews by committee and online voting by 5,437 people over the course of [two weeks]14 days, from November 21st to December 4th.
2013.12.14 View 9421