Professor Sang Ouk Kim from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has been selected as one of the Meeting Chairs of the Materials Research Society (MRS) for the 2025 Spring Meeting. Professor Kim has earned his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, publishing research on the self-assembly of block copolymers on lithographically defined nanopatterned substrates in Nature. Since 2004, he published around 280 scientific papers which have been cited over 28,000 times. The KAIST Herald interviewed him regarding his recent appointment as the Spring 2025 MRS Meeting Chair.

Q. Please briefly introduce yourself to the readers.

I am Sang Ouk Kim and I have been a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST for almost 20 years. Currently, I am also serving as the director for the KAIST Institute for the NanoCentury as well as the Center for Ethics and Human Rights.

Q. Can you tell us your thoughts on being chosen as the Meeting Chair of the MRS for 2025 Spring?

It is a great honor to be selected as the Meeting Chair of MRS, which has approximately 130,000 members from 90 countries. As more than 5,000 people gather in every meeting, it can be said that it is the biggest conference in the materials science field. Normally, around five people are selected as the Meeting Chair for every conference, and I am the only Asian on this occasion. Ceramics and metals were used to be the mainstream in materials science for a long time, but it shifted towards newer and more diverse materials such as electronic materials and macromolecules 50 years ago. MRS is a conference that diverged from the original to put more focus on the latter. Personally, I was the first professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST for research areas such as macromolecules, so being chosen as the Meeting Chair is of great meaning to me.

Q. As the Meeting Chair of the 2025 Spring Meeting, what is your aim?

While the MRS used to consist mainly of scholars from the US, the importance of Asian scholars has been realized in the last decade. South Korea persisted in its research activities even under COVID-19, such that the current research activities among Korean scientists are approaching the world-frontier level. I hope the 2025 MRS Spring Meeting would be a nice opportunity to introduce the highly advanced materials science and technologies from South Korea.

Q. Can you give some advice to KAIST students?

The previous graduate students in my research lab used to attend numerous international conferences before COVID-19, which could not be continued during the pandemic. Current undergraduate students would have experienced the pandemic during their high school period or the early days of university period and thereby have limited experience going abroad. However, I would like to emphasize that it is very important for a scientific researcher to be open-minded to the international standards in all different aspects, so I would like to recommend students to experience going overseas, [through ways] such as going on an exchange program or attending graduate school abroad.