Ryoo Ryong - Work

Work

After obtaining Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1986, Ryong Ryoo worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (U. C. Berkeley) as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Ryoo studied on the solid state NMR under the supervision of Prof. Alex Pines (1986. 01 ∼ 1986. 11). Then, Dr. Ryoo moved to the Department of Chemistry at KAIST as a professor (1986. 12).

During his research at KAIST, Prof. Ryoo laid many scientific cornerstones on nanoporous carbon and hierarchically nanoporous zeolite materials science. Dr. Ryoo developed a hard-templating synthesis strategy toward nanoporous carbon material and its application to the research field of fuel cell, which was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry B(1999) and Nature(2001). This synthesis strategy is being evaluated as a creative and innovative approach for synthesis of not only nanoporous carbon, but also other nanoporous materials such as zeolites, polymers and metal oxides. In addition,

Prof. Ryoo has been focusing on the synthesis of hierarchically nanoporous zeolite materials and their catalytic applications. In this work, he proposed several innovative synthesis strategies in porous materials preparation. He reported the organosilane-directed synthesis route to the mesoporous zeolites in Nature Materials (2006). Ryoo also released an article on the synthesis of single-unit-cell thick nanosheet zeolites in Nature (2009). In this approach, a surfactant chemically incorporating a zeolite structure-directing head group was used, which can generate zeolite micropores as well as mesoporous structures simultaneously in a single synthesis step.

Prof. Ryoo received the Breck Award from the International Zeolite Association in 2010. In 2011, He extended the surfactant-directing synthesis strategy to various nanoporous structures such as hexagonal honeycomb and disordered nanosponge, rather than lamellar-type nanosheet, and reported these results in Science (2011). Since 2007, Dr. Ryoo has been named National Honor Scientist by the Korean Government and has received research funds. In addition, he became a distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry at KAIST in 2008. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and member of the Editorial Board for both Chemical Communications and ChemCatChem.