POSTECH Distinguished Unversity Professor Sang-Wook Cheong of the Department of Physics, also Professor of Rutgers University, was awarded the James C. McGroddy prize, and was the first Korean recipient. The American Physical Society (APS) recently held a symposium in Portland, in which the James C. McGroddy Prize was awarded to Nicola A. Spaldin of UC Santa Babara, Ramamoorthy Ramesh of UC Berkeley, in addition Cheong.

Prof. Cheong has researched about the physics of oxides, including multiferroics, colossal magnetoresistive oxides and high Tc superconductors, getting credit for contributions in theory and experiments that have advanced the understanding and utility of multiferroic oxides.

Having once suggested a new paradigm reporting reproducible interplay between electric polarization and applied magnetic fields exhibited by TbMn2O5, which is strongly useful for ferroelectric memory, Prof. Cheong recently published an article under the title ‘Insulating interlocked ferroelectric and structural antiphase domain walls in multiferroic YMnO3’ in Nature Materials.

Prof. Cheong has published approximately 500 SCI articles with total citation numbers above 17,000 after 1995, including seven in Nature and two in Science. Moreover, he is the author of articles with citation numbers above 1,000 each, and is thus estimated to the world’s most notable Korean physicist. POSTECH invited Prof. Cheong as a distinguished professor last 2006 to promote the maturation of natural science of Korea. Prof. Cheong researches condensed matter physics using the accelerator.

The James C. McGroddy prize, named after the vice president and councilor of IBM, awards worldwide physicists with great performance in the material development and application fields. With the Olive C. Buckley prize, it is one of the highest awards conferred by APS. A total of 16% of the former 86 winners also were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics since the foundation of the award in 1975.