In recognition of excellence in research, Professors Ji Oon Lee and Hyungryul Baik have been appointed to a three-year term from March 2020 to February 2023 as KAIST Endowed Chair Professor and Ewon Assistant Professor, respectively.

Each professor will receive a research grant of 60 million KRW during this period.

In addition, Professor Hyungryul Baik’s latest work has been selected for The Top Ten KAIST Research Achievements in 2019 for his collaboration with Professor Sang-Hyun Kim (KIAS) and Professor Thomas Koberda (University of Virginia).

In this study, Professor Baik investigated the differentiability of the action of the mapping class groups on one-dimensional spaces and solved a 20-year-old challenge. The results of this study, published in the Journal of the European Mathematical Society, are also expected to be helpful in understanding the structure of the moduli space, which is the space of all possible geometric shapes that a surface can have.