At only 39 years old, Professor Hoon Sohn, Distinguished Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, is the youngest professor to have received tenure at KAIST. He also happens to be the Edward M. Curtis Visiting Professor in Civil Engineering at Purdue University, the writer of 42 academic journals registered to the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information (*), and one of the world’s leading authorities in the field of Structure Health Monitoring (SHM).

SHM involves the processing of data with statistical methods to track and rate the safety of an artificial structure. Indeed one would be quite hard put to enumerate every major triumph Professor Sohn has achieved during his career. In light of such brilliant accomplishments, Professor Sohn has recently won the Structural Health Monitoring Person of the Year (SHM-POY) Award.

The SHM-POY Award was conferred during the 8th International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (IWSHM), held from September 13 to 15 at Stanford University, California. IWSHM seeks to discuss the current state of technologies in SHM and recognize key issues crucial to the research and development of the field. The SHM-POY awardee meanwhile is selected by the editors and associate editors of the journal Structural Health Monitoring. The evaluation of candidates is based on, according to the IWSHM website, their contribution to the field in the form of “theory, analysis, applications, education, or other ways that … benefit society.”

Professor Sohn was especially recognized during the selection process for his achievement in developing “Reference-free damage diagnosis” in 2007, which has significantly improved the accuracy of structural safety evaluations. This method of SHM involves attaching smart-sensors to a structure and excluding external factors- such as changes in temperature or load applied by the environment- from the data collected by the sensors.