KSEA is very pleased to announce 2 winners for the 2012 KSEA Young Investigator Grant. Each winner will be awarded $10,000 honorarium and a grant certificate. This year, more than 40 applications from highly qualified researchers and engineers were received.  The KSEA Young Investigator Grant was designed to recognize those who have demonstrated the outstanding early career as a young investigator whose achievement in science or technology areas is outstanding within the context of the mission of KSEA. Evaluation and selection was conducted by the KSEA Honors and Awards committee based on review of the submitted application form, technology development plan, reference letters and resume.

After a strict evaluation process by the Honors and Awards Committee, Dr. Jongho Lee(Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Cheol-Hwan Park(Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center) have been selected as final 2 winners.

Dr. Jonho Lee is a recipient of International Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial scholarship for M.S. and Samsung Scholarship Foundation scholarship for his Ph.D. He has served several Korean communities, including Korean Student Association at Stanford as a staff member and KSEA Philadelphia chapter as a 2011 career day speaker.

For the KSEA Young Investigator Grant, Dr. Lee proposed “A Novel MRI Contrast for Ultra-High Resolution Tractography and Myelin Content Map of Brain.” In this proposal, Dr. Lee has suggested exploring two new MRI methods to advance our understanding of the brain structure and to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of brain diseases and injury.  

Dr. Lee will continue to focus on discovering novel contrast mechanisms and developing novel technology to advance medical imaging and to improve diagnosis and prognosis of brain diseases and injury.  He will also actively collaborate with the MRI community in Korea to educate young Korean scholars in the field and to promote the health care industry in Korea as well as in America.

Dr. Cheol-Hwan Park is the first recipient of the annual Jackson Koo award (2009) – given to the best PhD candidate in condensed matter research – from the physics department of UC Berkeley.  He is one of the two winners of the 2011 Outstanding Young Researcher Award (OYRA) given by the Association of Korean Physicists in America (AKPA).

Dr. Park received the KSEA Young Investigator Grant for the proposal entitled “Theoretical modeling of graphene nanostructures” Dr. Park has investigated spectroscopic properties of graphene from first-principles calculations and theoretical modeling, especially focusing on the effects of interactions between charge carriers and elementary excitations in graphene.  Once we understand transport properties of graphene from atomistic quantum mechanical simulations, we can make better electronic and spintronic graphene devices.    Although the focus of previous researches was on the spectroscopic properties of graphene, the results are closely related to its transport properties.

Dr. Park will combine his specialties in graphene and the theoretical tools currently being developed at Bosch Research and Technology Center to explain and predict some of the key spectroscopic and transport properties of graphene and related nanostructures.