Seokhyoung Kim
Graduate Student Excellence
S
eokhyoung Kim grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and entered
Pohang University of Science and Technology, POSTECH,
in 2005 for undergraduate studies in Chemistry. Shortly after
his first year, he took a temporary leave to finish his mandatory
military service in the Republic of Korea Army for two years,
after which he started his undergraduate research in polymers.
In the fall of 2010, Seokhyoung travelled to San Francisco, CA,
to spend a year at the University of California at Berkeley as an
undergraduate exchange student. There, he joined Professor
Rachel Segalman’s group, and performed research on the de-
S
eokhyoung took a gap year in 2013 to attend Ewha Womans
University, one of the most prestigious universities in Korea,
as a research associate. Here, under the guid-
ance of Prof. Dong-Ha Kim, he switched his re-
search focus to plasmon-enhanced dye-sensi-
tized solar cells, and perovskite solar cells. After
a year there, Seokhyoung received a significant
scholarship from the Kwanjeong Foundation,
which allowed him to return to America, to join
to the Department of Chemistry at UNC and Pro-
fessor Jim Cahoon’s re-
search group.
S
The Cahoon Research Group
velopment of ordered-heterojunction solar cell architectures,
using rod-coil block copolymers. The time in the Segalman
group was a tremendous experience, and the research expe-
rience at Berkeley inspired Seokhyoung to further pursue his
independent research at the graduate level.
A
fter graduating with his B.S. in Chemistry, 2012, having de-
veloped a deep interest for polymer science, Seokhyoung
joined to the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. However, his
love for soft polymeric materials did not last. Instead, Seokhy-
oung became very curious about hard semiconductor materi-
als.
12 | CHEMISTRY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
eokhyoung’s
prior
educational and re-
search experiences in
different schools and
labs, helped him under-
stand where his true re-
search interests lay, and
to find his postgraduate
institution. He chose the
Department of Chemistry
at UNC due to its excellence in research,
faculty, diversity, history, openness, and
cooperative environment. Finding a
home in the Cahoon group, Seokhyoung began his research in
designing morphologies in epitaxial silicon nanowires and de-
veloping novel nanophotonic properties in nanowire superlat-
tices.
S
eokhyoung feels that Carolina Chemistry was the ideal
home for his graduate research, and loves the quality of
people − faculty, postdocs, staff and students − the excellent
resources, and facilities, including Chapel Hill Analytical and
Nanofabrication Laboratory, CHANL. The open culture here
provides him with a learning environment where he feels sup-
ported in pursuing investigations into a variety of materials and
analytical systems.
| CHEM.UNC.EDU