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DGIST Professor and Student Honored with POSCO Science Fellowship
DGIST Professor and Student Honored with POSCO Science Fellowship
- Prof. Jinsu Seo and PhD Student Hyeonjeong Hwang of Brain and Cognitive Science named the recipient of the 10th POSCO Science Fellowship -
POSCO TJ Park Foundation has recently acknowledged the work of DGIST Professor Jinsu Seo of Brain and Cognitive Science and Ph.D. student Hyeonjeong Hwang and selected them as the new professor and a doctoral student of life science for ‘10th POSCO Science Fellow.’
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, POSCO Science Fellowship Program aims to nurture scientists by providing 70,000,000 KRW of research funding for 2~3 years. It selects 30 researchers every year, including new professors in the basic science fields including mathematics, physics, chemistry, and bioscience, post-doctors, and doctoral students. The 10th POSCO Science Fellowship had an acceptance rate of 11:1 and a total of 32 people were selected.
Professor Jinsu Seo, who is a brain and neuroscience researcher, was selected as a new professor for life and science field with a research on ‘A Study on the Impact and Mechanism of Alzheimer-related Genetic Variations on the Early Development and Activation of Human Brain Cells.”
Professor Seo clarified for the first time in the world that APOE4 genetic variations can cause Alzheimer dementia through the specific roles of brain cell aggregates and presented this on a world-class journal in neuroscience called ‘Neuron’. He plans to conduct research in the related field with a funding of 70,000,000 KRW from POSCO Cheong-Am Foundation for 2 years.
He said “By using induced pluripotent stem cell and genome editing technology, I will identify the pathological roles of disease-related genetic variations and how they interact and age to cause Alzheimer dementia.”
Ph.D. student Hyeonjeong Hwang was the first student of DGIST to be selected as a doctoral POSCO Science Fellow in life sciences with her research ‘Integrated Understanding of Neurotic Behavioral Plasticity”.
She is researching the principles of neurotic behavioral plasticity through Caenorhabditis elegans’ pheromone evasion, and will continue to perform the research with a funding of 75,000,000 KRW from POSCO Cheong-Am Foundation for 3 years.
She said, “Like Andrew Fire who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine as the first scientist to discover the RNA interference phenomenon through research using Caenorhabditis elegans, I aspire to become a scientist who conducts research using Caenorhabditis elegans and contributes to the advancement of basic science.”