Dae Wook Kim (left) and President Chang-Ock Lee of KSIAM (right) pose together after the awarding ceremony.

The Korean Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (KSIAM) hosted its Spring Conference 2021 on June 25-27, 2021 in Gangneung, South Korea.

At the conference, KSIAM presented Dae Wook Kim, a doctoral student working under the guidance of Professor Jae Kyoung Kim, with the Best Young Researcher Award 2021 for his paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on October 26, 2020.

The paper is titled “Wake-sleep cycles are severely disrupted by diseases affecting cytoplasmic homeostasis.”

Each year, KSIAM selects one awardee among young researchers in applied mathematics, who have earned a PhD degree from universities in Korea within the last 2 years, to recognize their outstanding work.

Scheduled for graduation in August 2021, Kim and his adviser, along with a research team from Florida State University, have identified the principle of how aging and diseases like dementia and obesity cause sleep disorders. A combination of mathematical modelling and experiments demonstrated that the cytoplasmic congestion caused by aging, dementia, and/or obesity disrupts the circadian rhythms in the human body and leads to irregular sleep-wake cycles. This finding suggests new treatment strategies for addressing unstable sleep-wake cycles.