– Reuters ranks POSTECH at 12th place, ahead of UC Schools, Johns Hopkins and Caltech
– POSTECH recognized for scientific innovation, including artificial corneal bioink and mussel protein stem cell carrier

POSTECH ranked 12th on the World’s Most Innovative Universities list of 2019. Announced on the 24th by the international news agency Reuters, POSTECH ranked the highest among Asian universities.

Reuters, along with world-renowned data research firm Clarivate Analytics, publishes the innovative universities ranking every year, using criteria including academic papers and their influence, total patent applications, and citations.

POSTECH ranked 12th, surpassing the University of California System (13th), Johns Hopkins (15th) and California Institute of Technology (16th). POSTECH was ranked first in Asia, followed by Japan’s University of Tokyo (26th), Seoul National University (29th), KAIST (34th) and China’s Tsinghua University (41st).

Reuters described POSTECH as “a university founded by the South Korean steel company POSCO in 1986” and as a “research-oriented university with unique ties to industry.” It introduced these two technologies as major innovations: From this year, creating artificial corneas using a 3D printer (Professor Dong-Woo Cho of Mechanical Engineering and Professor Jinah Jang of Creative IT Engineering, supported by Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy); and protein stem cell carrier technology using mussel adhesive protein from 2018 (Professor Hyung Joon Cha of Department of Chemical Engineering, supported by Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries).

Between 2012 and 2017, POSTECH applied for a total of 349 patents and showed a high grant rate of 79.7%. It scored 48.8 points on the commercial impact score – above the average score of 40.5 points – which evaluates the number papers cited in the patent filings.

In the evaluation, Stanford University ranked first for five consecutive years, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. In Korea, a total of six universities including POSTECH – Seoul National University, KAIST, Sungkyunkwan University (45th), Hanyang University (72th), Yonsei University (76th) – ranked in the top 100.