Professor Park Yoon-Soo of the Department of Chemistry at KAIST and Professor Chung Choong-Won of the Department of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University have been selected as the inaugural recipients of the Sejong Science Prize, newly established this year. The Sejong Science Prize was created by the Science Hall Foundation to discover and encourage outstanding early-career scientists under the age of 45, and the first two awardees were announced on the 5th. Notably, both recipients are former POSCO Science Fellows. Each award carries a prize of KRW 100 million, making it one of the largest monetary awards in Korea for young scientists. Here, we introduce the key achievements of the two POSCO Science Fellows selected as recipients of the inaugural Sejong Science Prize.

The POSCO Science Fellowship is a flagship program of the POSCO TJ Park Foundation that supports promising early-career scientists in Korea. Since its launch in 2009, the program has selected a total of 543 outstanding researchers in the fields of basic and applied sciences, providing cumulative research funding of KRW 36.4 billion and making a significant contribution to fostering a stable and supportive research environment.