Highlights
Shilong Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate from Professor Youngsoo Shin’s research group (DT Lab) in the School of Electrical Engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 SPIE Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship, receiving a $10,000 award.
The SPIE Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship is awarded to an outstanding graduate student studying advanced lithography or a related field, jointly funded by Siemens EDA and SPIE. Nick Cobb was a Senior Member of SPIE and Chief Engineer at Mentor Graphics (now Siemens EDA), whose pioneering contributions enabled optical and process proximity correction (OPC) for IC manufacturing.
Zhang has been recognized for his outstanding research accomplishments, including winning the First Place Photronics Best Student Presentation Award at SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography 2025 and the ISE President Best Paper Award at the 2024 International SoC Design Conference. He was honored during the 2026 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, held February 22–26 in San Jose, California, where he also presented his paper titled “Etch proximity correction for curvilinear layout: Curve sampling with ML etch bias model.”
For details, refer to the link below:
https://spie.org/news/2026-spie-nick-cobb-memorial-scholarship-recipient-announced
Dr. Dongheon Lee from Professor Jung-Woo Choi’s research group will be appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Electronic, Information and Communication Engineering at Pukyong National University, effective September 2026.
Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. in February 2025, dedicating his research to artificial intelligence models for spatial acoustic analysis. During his doctoral studies, he conducted in-depth research on an integrated acoustic analysis system encompassing speech enhancement, sound source separation, noise reduction, direction-of-arrival estimation, and classification, utilizing spatial acoustic signals collected through multi-channel microphones.
In particular, he presented the “DeepASA” model at NeurIPS 2025, a unified spatial acoustic AI framework capable of comprehensively inferring all related tasks within a single model. In addition, he developed innovative multi-channel speech enhancement models and achieved outstanding research accomplishments by publishing a total of 12 first-author papers in leading conferences and journals in speech and audio, including ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, and IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP). Furthermore, he demonstrated his practical technological expertise by leading his team to victory in DCASE Task 4, the 2025 international challenge on acoustic scene analysis.
We sincerely congratulate Dr. Dongheon Lee as he embarks on his career as an independent researcher. We wish him continued success in advancing the field of acoustic artificial intelligence and in emerging as a leading scholar in world-class research.
Dr. Kyeongwon Jeong, Dr. Yoontae Jung, and Dr. Edward Jongyoon Choi, Ph.D. graduates from Prof. Minkyu Je’s research group, have been appointed as Assistant Professors at the School of Integrated Technology, Yonsei University; the Department of Semiconductor Engineering, Kyung Hee University; and the Division of Electronic and Semiconductor Engineering, Ewha Womans University, respectively.
Dr. Kyeongwon Jeong received his Ph.D. in February 2023 and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on mixed-signal circuit design and intelligent sensor interfaces, including ADCs, neural and ultrasound systems, in-memory computing hardware accelerators, and Ising machine architectures.
Dr. Yoontae Jung earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees (2024) from KAIST. Since 2024, he has been conducting research on neural interface ICs at imec in Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include biomedical ICs, neural ICs, sensor interface ICs for physical AI, and processing-in-memory (PIM) technologies.
Dr. Edward Jongyoon Choi received his Ph.D. in February 2025 and subsequently joined Annapurna Labs (Amazon Web Services) in Silicon Valley as a Circuit Design Engineer, where he contributed to the design of the AWS Trainium accelerator. His primary research interests include AI/ML accelerator design, algorithm–hardware co-design, and processing-in-memory circuit design, with a focus on circuit and architecture design for high-performance, low-power intelligent semiconductor systems.
We look forward to their continued contributions to academia through excellence in research and education and to their impact on the advancement of semiconductor and advanced engineering research worldwide.
Gichan Yun, a Ph.D. candidate from the research group of Prof. Minkyu Je in the School of Electrical Engineering, has been selected as a recipient of the 2025–2026 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award.
The SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is a prestigious program presented to outstanding Ph.D. students worldwide who have demonstrated exceptional research accomplishments in solid-state circuits and systems. Each year, only a limited number of students are selected; this year, Gichan Yun was named among just 30 awardees globally.
Gichan Yun has published a total of 23 international papers, including two ISSCC papers as first author or co–first author. Among these, 17 papers have been published in SSCS-sponsored journals and conferences. His contributions to low-power, high-resolution sensor interface design and his strong academic achievements were key factors leading to this distinguished recognition.
We are delighted to share that three Ph.D. alumni from the Integrated Organic Electronics Laboratory (Advisor: Prof. Seunghyup Yoo) — Dr. Marco Alban-Paccha, Dr. Hyung Suk Kim, and Dr. Jee Hoon Sim — have been appointed as Assistant Professors at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin; the Department of Semiconductor Engineering, Gachon University; and the Department of Electronic Engineering, Soonchunhyang University, respectively.
After earning his Ph.D. in 2022, Dr. Marco Alban-Paccha worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. George Malliaras’s group the University of Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on wearable biomedical technologies, with particular interest in clinically meaningful multimodal sensing that spans device fabrication, system-level implementation, and AI-based biosignal analysis.
Dr. Hyungseok Kim, who also received his Ph.D. in 2022, served as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Chihaya Adachi’s group at Kyushu University and later as a researcher at Samsung Display. His primary research area is OLED device physics, and he has published impactful work in leading journals such as Science Advances and Nature Communications.
Dr. Jihoon Shim graduated in 2023 and subsequently worked in the Display Group of MX Division at Samsung Electronics. During his doctoral studies, he published outstanding research in Science Advances on biomedical applications based on highly flexible OLED technologies.
We sincerely congratulate these three alumni on their new appointments and look forward to seeing them continue to excel and make meaningful contributions in research, education, and service to society.
Se Jin Park, a doctoral researcher from Professor Yong Man Ro’s laboratory, received his Ph.D. in February 2026 and has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Kyung Hee University as of March 2026. Throughout her doctoral studies, Park has been conducting research on multimodal artificial intelligence that integrates speech, vision, and language, with the goal of enabling natural and seamless interaction between humans and AI.
Park has been developing methods for visual–acoustic representation learning, modeling long- and short-term conversational context, and leveraging both linguistic and nonverbal cues from human interaction for dialogue understanding and generation. Her research achievements have been recognized internationally. She has presented a total of 13 papers at top-tier conferences such as ICML, ACL, CVPR, AAAI, and ICASSP, and her work has been selected for several prestigious distinctions, including the ACL Outstanding Paper Award, ICML Oral, CVPR Highlight, ACL Oral, and AAAI Oral. Through these accomplishments, Park has established herself as a competitive researcher in the fields of multimodal AI and conversational intelligence.
Park has expressed her intention to continue pursuing research on conversational intelligence that enables AI systems to collaborate and communicate effectively with real users in complex interaction environments that combine speech, vision, and language. Our school sincerely congratulates her on this new beginning and looks forward to her future contributions in education, research, and industry collaboration at Kyung Hee University.
Daehyun Kang, an MS/PhD Integrated Student in Professor Byung Jin Cho’s research group within our school, has been awarded the Grand Prize (University Division) at the 32nd Samsung Humantech Paper Award.
Daehyun Kang was recognized for presenting new possibilities in next-generation semiconductor technology through his research titled, “Bandgap Engineering of Boron Oxynitride (BON) Applied within the Tunneling Layer of Flash Memory.”
Conventional NAND flash memory faces a chronic issue where unwanted charge leakage occurs during data erasure, leading to diminished storage stability. To address this, Daehyun Kang adopted an innovative approach by replacing the traditional SiON material with BON (Boron Oxynitride), which possesses asymmetric energy barrier characteristics.
As this research involved a completely unprecedented material, Daehyun Kang faced significant challenges, including establishing the entire process from deposition design to post-treatment conditions. His dedication, however, led to a breakthrough that significantly alleviates the long-standing trade-off between data I/O speed and reliability.
This achievement is particularly meaningful as Daehyun Kang had faced an initial setback last year, failing to pass the abstract screening for a similar topic. Using that experience as a catalyst, he spent the following year rigorously refining his research design, ultimately securing the Grand Prize. In recognition of this excellence, his advisor, Professor Byung Jin Cho, was honored with the Special Mentor Award.
“This experience has convinced me that the courage to challenge oneself is what ultimately drives growth,” Daehyun Kang stated in his acceptance speech. He added, “I hope my research doesn’t just remain on paper but contributes meaningfully to actual memory semiconductor processes and mass production environments.”
Established in 1994, the Samsung Humantech Paper Award is South Korea’s most prestigious paper competition. This year, it saw intense competition with a total of 3,172 abstracts submitted. While the Grand Prize has historically leaned toward basic science disciplines over the past 30 years, this win is considered highly exceptional and significant as it emerged from the field of traditional semiconductor device research. This success once again proves the department’s outstanding research capabilities and its commitment to fostering talent that will lead the future semiconductor industry.
Dr. Jiman Yu of the Nano-Oriented Bio-Electronics Lab (Advisor: Prof. Yang-Kyu Choi) in the School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the School of Electronics Engineering at Kyungpook National University, effective March 1, 2026.
Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. degree with the dissertation titled “Silicon-based Synaptic Transistors for Computing-In-Memory.” During his doctoral studies, he published a total of 58 research papers, including 16 first-author papers in leading journals such as Advanced Functional Materials, Small, and IEEE Electron Device Letters.
After obtaining his Ph.D. in February 2024, Dr. Yu has been working at the SK hynix Future Technology Research Center, where he has been developing key technologies for DRAM scaling.
His future research interests include next-generation neuromorphic devices, 3D DRAM, and metal interconnection technologies.
