Professor Byeongmoon Jeong Wins ‘Hanwha Polymer Award’
- Date2021.04.09
- 4128
Professor Byeongmoon Jeong from the Department of Chemistry and Nanoscience has won the Hanwha Polymer Award at the <2021 Spring Polymer Conference> held by the Polymer Society of Korea last April 8th(Thursday).
Hanwha Total Co. established the Hanwha Polymer Award last 2005 for the development of Polymer science, which forms the basis of basic science and petrochemical industry technology. Hanwha Total Co. has also been annually supporting selected scientists who have contributed to the development of the domestic Polymer Studies field, supporting 10 million won of research funds.
Professor Byeongmoon Jeong, selected as this year’s award recipient, was recognized with his contribution to domestic medical chemistry and material field via his studies on ‘Biodegradable Thermogels and their Biomedical Applications’. Professor Jeong has been conducting research regarding structured synthesis of newly developed biodegradable medical thermogels and applying them to biomedical fields.
His most recognized studies were about Structured Synthesis of Biodegrading Thermosensitive Sol-Gel Reversible Hydrogel, Transition mechanisms, drug delivery cell culture and more. Such medical application studies allowed him to publish 81 papers on SCI(E) level journals as main author(cited 9,315 times) only if limited to the Thermogel field. The journals include; <Nature>, <Adv. Mater.>, <Adv. Funct. Mater.>, <Biomaterials>, <J. Controlled Release>, <Macromolecules>, <Biomacromolecules> and more. Moreover, he had registered 10 patents.
Professor Jeong has published 123 SCI(E) level papers in total, and these papers were cited 10,746 times, h-index 47 according to the Web of Science. To be specific, his papers have resolved thermogel’s most critical problems such as 1) adoption of Biodegradability and retaining time of gel state, 2) powder formation and adjusting dissolution with lag time, 3) stability of preservation and adoption of enzyme degradation and more. He also worked as a Principal Investigator in Individual Studies, Stem Cell Regeneration Project and more, through promising Polypeptide Gel-Sol Transition Polymer Studies, with scaffold materials of cells and biomedical products. Recently Professor Jeong has been actively working together with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy with their project regarding Biodegradable Polymer-related Critical Components. In this year, he is currently accelerating the commercialization process by transferring the technology of ‘Bioactive Sol-Gel Transition Polypeptide Material’ Patent.
In addition, Professor Jeong was appointed as Fellow of Biomaterials Science & Engineering(FBSE) by the World Biomaterials Congress in 2020, where one or two people are usually elected every four years. Furthermore, he has been working voluntarily as Secretary of the Polymer Division at Korean Chemical Society , member of Polymer Society of Korea, Vice President of Korea Society of Biomaterials, and Editor in Chief of <Biomaterials Research> at the same society. Being recognized with such contributions, it led him to win this year’s Hanwha Polymer Award, which is one of the best Awards of Korea’s Polymer Study fields.
Professor Jeong gave his acceptance speech that “I sincerely thank everyone who helped me to carry on studies concerning Application of Polymer Biomaterials. I will do my best to conclude with practical results in this Biotechnology field.”