A doctoral student in the second year of his MS/PhD program won the Global PhD Fellowship 2019 granted by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea.

Each year since 2011, NRF hosted a student research competition with the purpose of fostering outstanding graduate students, and this year, it selected a total of 216 research projects across the nation to endow an annual grant of 30 million KRW per student for two years.

Hyukpyo Hong proposed research on the “Development of Stochastic Model Reduction Methodology and its Application to an Optogenetic System.”

Hong has been studying a research topic with an interdisciplinary approach to mathematics and biology under the guidance of Professor Jae Kyoung Kim.

His major interest lies in chemical reaction network theory (CRNT), a field that attempts to discover the properties of stochastic process from the combinatorial structure of reaction networks, as well as stochastic model methods in application of CRNT. In addition, he has been working on mathematical modeling based on an optogenetic system to investigate correlation between a decreased cognitive ability resulted from sleep deprivation and proteins that regulate biological rhythms.