The Biomacromolecular Research Lab (Director: Professor Jae Hyung Park) in Sungkyunkwan University’s Natural Sciences Campus has produced the highest number of ‘Global PhD Fellowship’ members in Korea.  The Global PhD Fellowship is a governmental scholarship designed to cultivate world-class PhD professionals by providing 30 million won annually per person for 5 years.  Four graduate students were selected to be Global PhD Fellows.

Along with that, sixteen graduate students out of the nineteen in the lab have been selected for other fellowships including the President Post-Doc Fellowship, National Junior Research Fellowship, and so on.  The President Post-Doc Fellowship is the biggest scholarship a post-doc researcher can win; it provides 130 million won annually for five years.  Wooram Uhm who was chosen for the Global PhD Fellowship said, “It’s exceptional for one research team to make progress with such large projects as well as have most of the graduate students in the lab win a scholarship fund.  As a result, the number of graduate students in the research center has almost quadrupled.”

Furthermore, this leads to outstanding results in research areas.  For the past four years, 51 Science Citation Index (SCI) class theses have been published in world-class scientific journals in the biomedical field including Biomaterials.  The research center is also conducting joint research with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Samsung Medical Center.

The graduate students in the research center said that the secret to this outcome was strong teamwork.  Prof. Jae Hyung Park has a discussion every month with all of the graduate students in the research center and the doctoral researchers to share the contents of their research and determine which directions they should pursue.

“New pharmaceuticals are hard to develop in Korea with insufficient research and development funding.  Increasing the efficiency of pre-existing medicine is our main research aim,” said Prof. Park