MOF
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UAE Space Program Leaders named to be the 1st of the honorees of KAIST Alumni Association's special recognition for graduates of foreign nationality
The KAIST Alumni Association (Chairman, Chil-Hee Chung) announced on the 12th that the winners of the 2023 KAIST Distinguished Alumni Award and International Alumni Award has been selected.
The KAIST Distinguished Alumni Award, which produced the first recipient in 1992, is an award given to alumni who have contributed to the development of the nation and society, or who have glorified the honor of their alma mater with outstanding academic achievements and social and/or communal contributions.
On a special note, this year, there has been an addition to the honors, “the KAIST Distinguished International Alumni Award” to honor and encourage overseas alumni who are making their marks in the international community that will boost positive recognition of KAIST in the global setting and will later become a bridge that will expedite Korea's international efforts in the future.
As of 2022, the number of international students who succeeded in earning KAIST degrees has exceeded 1,700, and they are actively doing their part back in their home countries as leaders in various fields in which they belong, spanning from science and technology, to politics, industry and other corners of the society.
(From left) Omran Sharaf, the Assistant Minister of UAE Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for Advanced Science and Technology, Amer Al Sayegh the Director General of Space Project at MBRSC, and Mohammed Al Harmi the Director General of Administration at MBRSC (Photos provided by the courtesy of MBRSC)
To celebrate and honor their outstanding achievements, the KAIST Alumni Association selected a team of three alumni of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to receive the Distinguished International Alumni Award for the first time. The named honorees are Omran Sharaf, a master’s graduate from the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, and Amer Al Sayegh and Mohammed Al Harmi, master’s graduates of the Department of Aerospace Engineering - all three of the class of 2013 in leading positions in the UAE space program to lead the advancement of the science and technology of the country.
Currently, the three alums are in directorship of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) with Mr. Omran Sharaf, who has recently been appointed as the Assistant Minister in charge of Advanced Science and Technology at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, being the Project Director of the Emirates Mars Mission of MBRSC and Mr. Amer Al Sayegh in the Director General position in charge of Space Project and Mr. Mohammed Al Harmi, the Director General of Administration, at MBRSC.
They received technology transfer from “SatRec I”, Korea's first satellite system exporter and KAIST alumni company, for about 10 years from 2006, while carrying out their master’s studies at the same time.
Afterwards, they returned to UAE to lead the Emirates Mars Mission, which is already showing tangible progress including the successful launch of the Mars probe "Amal" (ال امل, meaning ‘Hope’ in Arabic), which was the first in the Arab world and the fifth in the world to successfully enter into orbit around Mars, and the UAE’s first independently developed Earth observation satellite "KhalifaSat".
An official from the KAIST Alumni Association said, "We selected the Distinguished International Alumni after evaluating their industrious leadership in promoting various space industry strategies, ranging from the development of Mars probes and Earth observation satellites, as well as lunar exploration, asteroid exploration, and Mars residence plans."
(From left) Joo-Sun Choi, President & CEO of Samsung Display Co. Ltd., Jung Goo Cho, the CEO of Green Power Co. Ltd., Jong Seung Park, the President of Agency for Defense Development (ADD), Kyunghyun Cho, Professor of New York University (NYU)
Also, four of the Korean graduates, Joo-Sun Choi, the CEO of Samsung Display, Jung Goo Cho, the CEO of Green Power Co. Ltd., Jong Seung Park, the President of Agency for Defense Development (ADD), and Kyunghyun Cho, a Professor of New York University (NYU), were selected as the winners of the “Distinguished Alumni Award”.
Mr. Joo-Sun Choi (Electrical and Electronic Engineering, M.S. in 1989, Ph.D. in 1995), the CEO of Samsung Display, led the successful development and mass-production of the world's first ultra-high-definition QD-OLED Displays, and preemptively transformed the structure of business of the industry and has been leading the way in technological innovation.
Mr. Jung Goo Cho (Electrical and Electronic Engineering, M.S. in 1988, Ph.D. in 1992), the CEO of Green Power Co. Ltd., developed wireless power technology for the first time in Korea in the early 2000s and applied it to semiconductor/display lines and led the wireless power charging technology in various fields, such as developing KAIST On-Line Electric Vehicles (OLEV) and commercializing the world's first wireless charger for 11kW electric vehicles.
Mr. Jong Seung Park (Mechanical Engineering, M.S. in 1988, Ph.D., in 1991), The President of ADD is an expert with abundant science and technology knowledge and organizational management capabilities. He is contributing greatly to national defense and security through science and technology.
Mr. Kyunghyun Cho (Computer Science, B.S., in 2009), the Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at NYU, is a world-renowned expert in Artificial Intelligence (AI), advancing the concept of 'Neural Machine Translation' in the field of natural language processing, to make great contributions to AI translation technology and related industries.
Chairman Chil-Hee Chung, the 26th Chair of KAIST Alumni Association “As each year goes by, I feel that the influence of KAIST alumni goes beyond science and technology to affect our society as a whole.” He went on to say, “This year, as it was more meaningful to extend the award to honor the international members of our Alums, we look forward to seeing more of our alumni continuing their social and academic endeavors to play an active role in the global stage in taking on the global challenges.”
The Ceremony for KAIST Distinguished Alumni and International Alumni Award Honorees will be conducted at the Annual New Year’s Event of KAIST Alumni Association for 2023 to be held on Friday, January 13th, at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas.
2023.01.12 View 10023 -
Ultrafast, on-Chip PCR Could Speed Up Diagnoses during Pandemics
A rapid point-of-care diagnostic plasmofluidic chip can deliver result in only 8 minutes
Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has been the gold standard for diagnosis during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the PCR portion of the test requires bulky, expensive machines and takes about an hour to complete, making it difficult to quickly diagnose someone at a testing site. Now, researchers at KAIST have developed a plasmofluidic chip that can perform PCR in only about 8 minutes, which could speed up diagnoses during current and future pandemics.
The rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 and other highly contagious viral diseases is important for timely medical care, quarantining and contact tracing. Currently, RT-PCR uses enzymes to reverse transcribe tiny amounts of viral RNA to DNA, and then amplifies the DNA so that it can be detected by a fluorescent probe. It is the most sensitive and reliable diagnostic method.
But because the PCR portion of the test requires 30-40 cycles of heating and cooling in special machines, it takes about an hour to perform, and samples must typically be sent away to a lab, meaning that a patient usually has to wait a day or two to receive their diagnosis.
Professor Ki-Hun Jeong at the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering and his colleagues wanted to develop a plasmofluidic PCR chip that could quickly heat and cool miniscule volumes of liquids, allowing accurate point-of-care diagnoses in a fraction of the time. The research was reported in ACS Nano on May 19.
The researchers devised a postage stamp-sized polydimethylsiloxane chip with a microchamber array for the PCR reactions. When a drop of a sample is added to the chip, a vacuum pulls the liquid into the microchambers, which are positioned above glass nanopillars with gold nanoislands. Any microbubbles, which could interfere with the PCR reaction, diffuse out through an air-permeable wall. When a white LED is turned on beneath the chip, the gold nanoislands on the nanopillars quickly convert light to heat, and then rapidly cool when the light is switched off.
The researchers tested the device on a piece of DNA containing a SARS-CoV-2 gene, accomplishing 40 heating and cooling cycles and fluorescence detection in only 5 minutes, with an additional 3 minutes for sample loading. The amplification efficiency was 91%, whereas a comparable conventional PCR process has an efficiency of 98%. With the reverse transcriptase step added prior to sample loading, the entire testing time with the new method could take 10-13 minutes, as opposed to about an hour for typical RT-PCR testing. The new device could provide many opportunities for rapid point-of-care diagnostics during a pandemic, the researchers say.
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Ultrafast and Real-Time Nanoplasmonic On-Chip Polymerase Chain Reaction for Rapid and Quantitative Molecular Diagnostics
ACS Nano (https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.1c02154)
-Professor
Ki-Hun Jeong
Biophotonics Laboratory
https://biophotonics.kaist.ac.kr/
Department of Bio and Brain Engineeinrg
KAIST
2021.06.08 View 8334 -
Energy Storage Using Oxygen to Boost Battery Performance
Researchers have presented a novel electrode material for advanced energy storage device that is directly charged with oxygen from the air. Professor Jeung Ku Kang’s team synthesized and preserved the sub-nanometric particles of atomic cluster sizes at high mass loadings within metal-organic frameworks (MOF) by controlling the behavior of reactants at the molecular level. This new strategy ensures high performance for lithium-oxygen batteries, acclaimed as a next-generation energy storage technology and widely used in electric vehicles.
Lithium-oxygen batteries in principle can generate ten times higher energy densities than conventional lithium-ion batteries, but they suffer from very poor cyclability. One of the methods to improve cycle stability is to reduce the overpotential of electrocatalysts in cathode electrodes. When the size of an electrocatalyst material is reduced to the atomic level, the increased surface energy leads to increased activity while significantly accelerating the material’s agglomeration.
As a solution to this challenge, Professor Kang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering aimed to maintain the improved activity by stabilizing atomic-scale sized electrocatalysts into the sub-nanometric spaces. This is a novel strategy for simultaneously producing and stabilizing atomic-level electrocatalysts within metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Metal-organic frameworks continuously assemble metal ions and organic linkers.
The team controlled hydrogen affinities between water molecules to separate them and transfer the isolated water molecules one by one through the sub-nanometric pores of MOFs. The transferred water molecules reacted with cobalt ions to form di-nuclear cobalt hydroxide under precisely controlled synthetic conditions, then the atomic-level cobalt hydroxide is stabilized inside the sub-nanometric pores.
The di-nuclear cobalt hydroxide that is stabilized in the sub-nanometric pores of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) reduced the overpotential by 63.9% and showed ten-fold improvements in the life cycle.
Professor Kang said, “Simultaneously generating and stabilizing atomic-level electrocatalysts within MOFs can diversify materials according to numerous combinations of metal and organic linkers. It can expand not only the development of electrocatalysts, but also various research fields such as photocatalysts, medicine, the environment, and petrochemicals.”
This study was reported in Advanced Science (Title: Autogenous Production and Stabilization of Highly Loaded Sub-Nanometric Particles within Multishell Hollow Metal-Organic Frameworks and Their Utilization for High Performance in Li-O2 Batteries).
This research was mainly supported by the Global Frontier R&D Program of the Ministry of Science, ICT & Planning (Grant No. 2013M3A6B1078884) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning, and the National Research Foundation of Korea (Grant No. 2019M3E6A1104196).
Profile:Professor Jeung Ku Kang
jeungku@kaist.ac.kr
http://nanosf.kaist.ac.kr/
Nano Materials Simulation and Fabrication Laboratory
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
KAIST
2020.06.15 View 11142 -
Algorithm Identifies Optimal Pairs for Composing Metal-Organic Frameworks
The integration of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and other metal nanoparticles has increasingly led to the creation of new multifunctional materials. Many researchers have integrated MOFs with other classes of materials to produce new structures with synergetic properties.
Despite there being over 70,000 collections of synthesized MOFs that can be used as building blocks, the precise nature of the interaction and the bonding at the interface between the two materials still remains unknown. The question is how to sort out the right matching pairs out of 70,000 MOFs.
An algorithmic study published in Nature Communications by a KAIST research team presents a clue for finding the perfect pairs. The team, led by Professor Ji-Han Kim from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, developed a joint computational and experimental approach to rationally design MOF@MOFs, a composite of MOFs where an MOF is grown on a different MOF.
Professor Kim’s team, in collaboration with UNIST, noted that the metal node of one MOF can coordinately bond with the linker of a different MOF and the precisely matched interface configurations at atomic and molecular levels can enhance the likelihood of synthesizing MOF@MOFs.
They screened thousands of MOFs and identified optimal MOF pairs that can seamlessly connect to one another by taking advantage of the fact that the metal node of one MOF can form coordination bonds with the linkers of the second MOF. Six pairs predicted from the computational algorithm successfully grew into single crystals.
This computational workflow can readily extend into other classes of materials and can lead to the rapid exploration of the composite MOFs arena for accelerated materials development. Even more, the workflow can enhance the likelihood of synthesizing MOF@MOFs in the form of large single crystals, and thereby demonstrated the utility of rationally designing the MOF@MOFs.
This study is the first algorithm for predicting the synthesis of composite MOFs, to the best of their knowledge. Professor Kim said, “The number of predicted pairs can increase even more with the more general 2D lattice matching, and it is worth investigating in the future.”
This study was supported by Samsung Research Funding & Incubation Center of Samsung Electronics.
(Figure: An example of a rationally synthesized MOF@MOFs (cubic HKUST-1@MOF-5 ))
2019.08.30 View 15051 -
Real-Time Analysis of MOF Adsorption Behavior
Researchers have developed a technology to analyze the adsorption behavior of molecules in each individual pore of a metal organic framework (MOF). This system has large specific surface areas, allowing for the real-time observation of the adsorption process of an MOF, a new material effective for sorting carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane.
Accurate measurements and assessments of gas adsorption isotherms are important for characterizing porous materials and developing their applications. The existing technology is only able to measure the amount of gas molecules adsorbed to the material, without directly observing the adsorption behavior.
The research team led by Professor Jeung Ku Kang from the Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability (EEWS) prescribed a real time gas adsorption crystallography system by integrating an existing X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurement device that can provide structural information and a gas adsorption measurement device.
Specifically, the system allowed the observation of a mesoporous MOF that has multiple pores rather than a single pore structure. The research team categorized the adsorption behaviors of MOF molecules by pore type, followed by observations and measurements, resulting in the identification of a stepwise adsorption process that was previously not possible to analyze.
Further, the team systematically and quantitatively analyzed how the pore structure and the type of adsorption molecule affect the adsorption behavior to suggest what type of MOF structure is appropriate as a storage material for each type of adsorption behavior.
Professor Kang said, “We quantitatively analyzed each pore molecule in real time to identify the effects of chemical and structural properties of pores on adsorption behavior.” He continued, “By understanding the real-time adsorption behavior of molecules at the level of the pores that form the material, rather than the whole material, we will be able to apply this technology to develop a new high-capacity storage material.”
This research was published in Nature Chemistry online on May 13, 2019 under the title ‘Isotherms of Individual Pores by Gas Adsorption Crystallography’.
(Figure. Schematic illustration of molecules adsorbed on metal organic frameworks with different pores of various structures, where the In-situ X-ray crystallography has been developed to classify each pore structure and analyze the position of the molecule to determine the amount of molecules adsorbed to each pore.)
2019.06.18 View 38137 -
133 Diplomats Worldwide Visit KAIST
THE KAIST Herald April 8, 2004by jong-kyoung Kim
On March 12, diplomatic corps in Korea visited Daedeok Valley"s KAIST after taking a trial run on the Korea Train eXpress(KTX). Composed of ambassadors from 79 nations and 54 international organizations, the 133 diplomatic corps went on board KTX at 10:30 AM in Seoul and arrived in Daejeon at 11:20 AM.
Shortly after arrival, the diplomatic corps attended a luncheon hosted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade(MOFAT) before paying visits to the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(ETRI) and KAIST. After being introduced to the current issues at KAIST, the diplomatic corps returned back to Seoul at 4:00 PM.
Seventy-nine embassy representatives out of eighty-seven currently stationed in Korea participated in this event, with fifty-four representatives from three international organizations. In addition, officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, a commercial relations director, and a regional representative accompanied them.
The trial rides on April 1 were organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to publicize Korea as being the fifth country (after Japan, France, Germany, and Spain) in the world to own an express train and to introduce the growth of Korea"s IT industry through visits to ETRI and KAIST.
Events such as this are held annually to improve the understandings of the diplomatic corps about Korea"s science, technology, culture and art and to further enhance bilateral relations.
2004.04.20 View 16225