Prof. Sang Ouk Kim

Prof. Sang Ouk Kim
Affiliation: Materials Science & Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

Prof. Kim attained his Ph.D. in 2000 from the Department of Chemical Engineering at KAIST and joined the Department of Materials Science & Engineering of KAIST as a professor in 2004. His main research interest is the directed self-assembly of soft materials, including block copolymers and 2D nanomaterials such as graphene oxide aiming at the practical utilization of the resultant nanostructures for electronics, energy, environmental and biological applications. Noticeably, he has pioneered the extension of molecular level self-assembly principle, previously mostly associated to biomolecules or polymers, for the general material fabrication methodologies based on various nanomaterials with molecular level precision. One of the prof. Kim’s well-known research achievements is the world-first discovery of graphene oxide liquid crystal. Since this original contribution, graphene based material fabrication has been rapidly advanced and approaching real-world applications in the form of 1D fibres, 2D films, and 3D nanoassmbled structures. Significantly, graphene oxide liquid crystal offers a valuable precursor state for the mass-production of sub-5 layer level high quality graphene powders. His contribution in materials research has been widely appreciated by prestigious honours, including the youngest fellow of the Korea Academy of Science and Technology (2020), Highly Cited Researcher from Clarivate Analytics (2018), the KAIST Grand Prize for Academic Excellence (2015) and Presidential Young Scientist Award (2013).