– Prof. Kwang Soo Kim and Prof. Hong Gil Nam are two of five “National Scientists”
named by the National Research Foundation of Korea

 
Prof. Kwang Soo Kim (Chemistry, 60) and Prof. Hong Gil Nam (Life Science, 53) of POSTECH have been named “National Scientists”, the highest honor that is accorded to scientists of greatest achievement.

 
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation of Korea announced on April 28, that five scientists including the two from POSTECH were nominated as National Scientists for their original, world-class research achievements. The prestigious award to the two POSTECH professors not only is the recognition of their remarkable scientific achievements but also is the proof that POSTECH has secured its place as the nation’s best research-oriented university.

 
The “National Scientist” Program is the highest research support program funded by the Government, which enables the selected scientists to receive 1.5 billion won per year for up to ten years.

 
Prof. Kwang Soo Kim of Department of Chemistry is the first scientist in the world to develope nanolenses capable of optical resolution beyond the diffraction limit. This research result has drawn a lot of attention since it was published in Nature last year. Prof. Kim is well-known as a pioneer in the field of Nanochemistry, and has been cited for more than 11,000 times.

 
Prof. Hong Gil Nam of Department of Life Science is a world authority on plant senescence and a pioneer in the field of Integrative Biosciences. He has recently identified a mechanism of aging-induced cell death, and published the result in Science. Apart from this, Prof. Nam has accomplished a rare feat of publishing research papers in all three of the world’s most influential scientific journals―Science, Nature, and Cell.

 
The names of the other three scientists who were selected as National Scientists this time are Prof. V. Narry Kim and Prof. Tae Won Noh (both at Seoul National University) and Prof. Jun-Muk Hwang (Korea Institute for Advanced Study). With addition of these five new names, the total number of National Scientists has now reached eight.