In the first week of February, six international scientists were awarded with the 2017 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships at the Delft Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Among them was Doctor Je-Kyung Ryu, a 2014 graduate of the Department of Physics at KAIST.

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships is a part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, a research fellowship program provided by the Research and Innovation of the European Commission. Named after the double Nobel Prize laureate, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions provide funding for research inside Europe and currently fund 100,000 scientists. Not only does the program fund purely academic research, but it also funds industrial doctorates. Aimed to fund the “best, most promising individual researchers”, the program requires its recipients to have completed at least four years of full time university research or a doctoral degree.

Dr. Je-Kyung Ryu, the KAIST alumnus recipient, is currently researching at the Cees Dekker Lab in the Department of Bionanosciences at TU Delft, in which another Korean researcher, Dr. Sungchul Kim from Seoul National University, received the fellowship as well. He is currently carrying out two projects: progresses in understanding N-ethylmaleimidesensitive factor (NSF) mediated disassembly of soluble NSF attachment protein receptor (SNARE) complexes, and ants within lipopolysaccharide (LPS) binding protein (LBP), CD14 — a human gene — and TLR4-MD2 for efficient LPS recognition and transfer. Dr. Ryu will be able to cover his research expenses and salary for two years with the 177,000 EUR grant.