Contact: Bob Ratliff
A new member of the physics and astronomy faculty at Mississippi State University is receiving an Oak Ridge Associated Universities honor that memorializes a late MSU administrator.
Seong-Gon Kim is among 24 young scientists being honored with a $10,000 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. He began work on the Starkville campus earlier this year.
The assistant professor's teaching and research concentration is computational physics. The award will support his investigation of computational tools that can be developed to analyze molecules for possible use in molecular-sized electronic devices.
ORAU is a national consortium of 86 doctoral-granting universities and colleges working to develop collaborative research among its members, federal facilities and private industry. Its offices are located in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the town founded in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
Given annually, the awards provide research seed money to gifted and promising faculty members at the organization's member institutions. They are designed as a living memorial for MSU's longtime research vice president who headed ORAU's Council of Sponsoring Institutions. Powe died in 1996 following a lengthy illness.
Interim MSU research vice president Jonathan Pote said the selection for a 2002 Powe award recognizes "the promise of Dr. Kim's research career and also is a reflection of the quality of MSU's young faculty members."
Kim holds doctoral and master's degrees from Michigan State University and a bachelor's from Seoul National University in his native South Korea.
Prior to coming to Mississippi, he was technology director at WiseNut Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based Internet search technology company.