The 2025 MIT Seoul Symposium will explore future research trends at MIT, highlighting breakthroughs in key areas such as Quantum and Silicon Photonics, Nanotechnology in materials and additive manufacturing, and Advances in semiconductor technology, hydrogen innovation, and battery materials/chemistry. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions with MIT faculty speakers during an evening networking reception.
Suehyun Chung is the head of LG Sciencepark and is responsible for developing both short-term and long-term technology strategies for LG Group. He governs the technologies across LG's subsidiaries, ranging from electronics and chemicals to life sciences.
From 2021 to 2024, he was responsible for the $6 billion consumer business at LG Uplus, which consists of mobile, internet, and IPTV. He led the corporate marketing, sales, business strategy, customer services, CX innovation, and home services.
And from 2020 to 2021, he was responsible for the $5B global sales and business strategy of mobile business at LG Electronics. He led the sales organization throughout the world.
He received an MBA from the Wharton School of UPenn and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Dr. Taegyun Moon joined Corporation Relations in October 2021 as Program Director. Moon will be working in the Life Science group.
Dr. Moon left his current position as Chief Strategy Officer at Aspen Imaging Healthcare in Plano, TX. In his role at Aspen, he has led new business development and, among other accomplishments, launched a new product through his partnership with Samsung. With some authorized overlap with Aspen, Moon also led strategy and business development for NeuroNexus Technologies (a University of Michigan spinoff) in Ann Arbor. Before that, he spent more than five years with Samsung Economic Research institute in Seoul as a Principal Research Analyst focusing on medical devices, pharma, and the digital health industries. Other positions held include Consultant at Boston Consulting Group (Seoul), Associate at McKinsey & Company (Seoul), CEO Jingfugong Food Inc. (Qingdao, China), and Research Assistant in the Neural Engineering Lab at the University of Michigan.
Moon earned his B.S. and M.S. both in Mechanical Engineering at the Korea University in Seoul, and his Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He speaks Korean (native) and Chinese in addition to English.
Carlos M. Portela is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Prof. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and he received degrees in Aerospace Engineering (B.S.) and Physics (B.A.) from the University of Southern California. At Caltech he worked on exploring the mechanical response of 3D architected materials from experimental and computational perspectives. He joined MIT in August of 2020.
Architected materials—i.e., materials whose three-dimensional (3D) micro- or nanostructure has been engineered to attain a specific purpose—are ubiquitous in nature and have enabled properties that are unachievable by all other existing materials. Their concept relies on maximizing performance while requiring a minimal amount of material. Several human-made 3D architected materials have been reported to enable novel mechanical properties such as high stiffness-to-weight ratios or extreme resilience, especially when nanoscale features present. However, most architected materials have relied on advanced additive manufacturing techniques that are not yet scalable and yield small sample sizes. Additionally, most of these nano- and micro-architected materials have only been studied in controlled laboratory conditions, while our understanding of their performance in real-world applications requires attention.
In this talk, we will explain the concept of architected materials, providing various examples that we routinely fabricate and test in our laboratory at MIT, and we will discuss how nanoscale features significantly enhance their performance. We will also discuss ongoing research directions that will not only allow us to scale-up their fabrication, but also understand how they perform in realistic conditions outside the laboratory—towards contributing to more efficient material solutions in industry and beyond.
Ryan Hamerly was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1988. He graduated from Boulder High School in 2006 and received a B.S. degree from Caltech in 2010, working with Prof. Yanbei Chen on black hole mergers. In 2016 he received a Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Stanford, for work with Prof. Hideo Mabuchi on quantum control, nanophotonics, and nonlinear optics. In 2017 he was at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), working with Prof. Yoshihisa Yamamoto on quantum annealing and optical computing concepts. He is currently an IC postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Prof. Dirk Englund.
The rise of LLMs and generative AI has caused a dramatic increase in the energy consumption of data centers, a problem that will continue to grow as AI becomes more ubiquitous. Our group studies the use of photonics as an enabler for next-generation AI accelerators that can be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than electronic processors, leveraging the bandwidth, latency, and low-loss interconnection advantages of optically encoded signals. I will discuss our work addressing the main challenges of photonic computing, including (i) scalability, where we are developing time-multiplexed and free-space optical systems to overcome area bottlenecks, (ii) noise and imperfections, where we have developed new hardware error correction algorithms for photonics, (iii) the use of delocalized computing to overcome von Neumann bottlenecks (with additional applications in quantum-secure computation), and (iv) training, where we have demonstrated a forward-only training algorithm for photonic neural networks.
Abate is the Chipman Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He completed his postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley and his PhD at Stanford University. His interdisciplinary research group at MIT works at the nexus of electrochemistry, condensed matter physics, earth sciences, and data science to develop materials and devices for next-generation energy storage, computing, and mining technologies. Prior to his Ph.D., he conducted research at IBM Almaden and Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years. Abate has been recognized as one of the “Talented 12” by C&E News, a Bose Fellow by MIT, and a Miller Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow by UC Berkeley. He also received the Young Investigator Award from the International Solid State Ionics Society, Daniel Cubicciotti Award from the Electrochemical Society and became the Principal Investigator on an ARPA-E award for geological hydrogen.
Outside the lab, Iwnetim is a co-founder and president of a non-profit organization (www.scifro.org) that empowers African youth to address local challenges through scientific research and innovation. The organization is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Physical Society.
Decarbonizing transportation, the grid, and heavy industries depends on the success of both short- and long-duration energy storage solutions. Through novel material design and chemistry, my lab addresses critical challenges in developing affordable, sustainable, and reliable energy storage technologies. For short (to medium)-duration storage, we design and develop new cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries rich in manganese and iron. Our goal is to achieve energy densities comparable to lithium-ion batteries but at lower costs, without relying on critical minerals, thereby accelerating the transition to more sustainable energy storage. For long-duration storage, we have developed groundbreaking pathways for producing hydrogen (H₂) and ammonia (NH₃) using subsurface chemistry. By harnessing redox reactions on Fe-rich rocks and utilizing the Earth's natural heat and pressure, we demonstrate the potential for stimulated geological H₂ and NH₃ production. These methods achieve near-zero CO₂ emissions while remaining cost-competitive with existing technologies. Our work integrates advanced materials design with sustainable chemistry to provide scalable, impactful solutions for a decarbonized future.