Director

Professor Yeongduk Kim graduated from the Nuclear Engineering department of Seoul National University.

His Ph. D. thesis was about “Multi-fraementation in intermediate nucleus-nucleus collisions”. The Miniball detector professor Kim manufactured has been used to detect various nuclear fragments in intermediate energy heavy-ion collisions. Afterwards, he worked as a post-doctor in Indiana university, and had been the JSPS post-doctoral fellow in the high energy physics laboratory in Tsukuba (KEK), Japan. During his stay at KEK, he developed world fastest timing detector with scintillating material to measure the lifetime of hypernuclei for the first time.

After returning to Seoul National University as a brain-pool researcher in 1995, he continued working on hyper-nuclear physics as well as on installing an accelerator mass spectroscopy accelerator.

In 1998, he became an assistant professor at Sejong University and became interested in the non-accelerator nuclear and particle physics experiments. In 2002 he began a dark matter search experiment, KIMS (Korean Invisible Mass Search), with Professors Sunkee Kim and Hongjoo Kim. He made a main contribution to KIMS project by finding a method to reduce Cs137 isotopes in CsI crystals, which enabled the search for dark matter with the crystals.

After he had heard about the possibility to measure the 3rd mixing angle of the neutrinos, he began a neutrino oscillation experiment (RENO) with Seoul National University group, which resulted in a successful measurement of that mixing angle. Also he is interested in the neutrinoless double beta decay using scintillating crystals, and is a executive member of AMoRE experiment. He has been the PI for KIMS experiment since 2012, and became a director of the research center of Institute for Basic Science (IBS).

Education

1978 – 1985 B.S. in physics. Department of Physics, Seoul National University, Korea
1985 – 1991 Doctor of Science in physics. Michigan State University, USA

Employment

2013.7 – Present Director, Center for Underground Physics IBS
2013.1 – 2013.5 Visiting Scholar, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2005 – 2006 Visiting Scholar, Columbia University
1998 – Present Professor, Department of Physics, Sejong University
1995 – 1998 Researcher, Seoul National University, Korea
1992 – 1995 Researcher, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan
1991 – 1992 Researcher, Indiana University, USA

Awards and honors

Outstanding Faculty, Sejong University

Major Research Interests

–Techniques ; scintillator, Subjects ; Dark Matter Search, Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

Major Activities