Professor Meeyoung Cha, a professor at the School of Computing and the Chief Investigator of the Pioneer Research Center for Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the Institute of Basic Science (IBS), has been appointed as the first Korean director at the Max Planck Institute (MPI), a prominent global basic science research institution based in Germany.

Operated by the Max Planck Society, MPI has over 80 research institutes in Europe and the United States and is organized into five major research areas: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Biology & Medicine, Material & Technology, Environment & Climate, and Humanities. Starting this June, Professor Cha will serve as the Scientific Director at the MPI for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany and lead the research group “Data Science for Humanity”.

Professor Cha has been appointed at KAIST since 2010, after working as a post-doctoral researcher at MPI for Software Systems for two years. Her research since then has garnered more than 20,000 citations on Google Scholar and has received numerous awards in misinformation, fraud detection, poverty mapping, and applied data mining. From 2015 to 2016, Professor Cha also worked on the Data Science Team at Facebook. In 2019, she was appointed as the Chief Investigator at IBS and contributed to research in the AI field as well. 

Professor Cha has also received numerous awards and recognition at diverse conferences. In 2015, she served as one of the three program co-chairs for the ninth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) held in the United Kingdom. Her distinguished achievements include the Korean Young Information Scientist Award in 2019 and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) ICWSM Test of Time Award in 2020, which was awarded for her paper “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy” written in 2010. In 2022, she received another Test of Time award at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), held by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest educational and scientific society of computing educators and researchers.

President Kwang Hyung Lee extended his congratulations, stating, “Her achievements will serve as a great role model for globalization to the students, and the school will support her in her joint position at KAIST and the MPI.”