Distinguished Professor Sang Il Seok from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST has been honored with the prestigious ‘Humboldt Research Award‘ in recognition of his groundbreaking research in the field of perovskite solar cells (PSCs).
The Humboldt Research Award, presented by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, honors scientists who have achieved exceptional international recognition for their research. Recipients of the award receive a prize of 80,000 euros to support their ongoing scholarly activities.
Professor Seok is widely recognized as a pioneer in high-efficiency PSC technology. He is credited with developing the world’s first all-inorganic heterojunction hybrid solar cells, utilizing perovskite—a breakthrough that has significantly advanced the manufacturing of high-performance perovskite-based photovoltaics.
To date, he has published over ten papers in leading scientific journals, such as Nature and Science. Notably, based on the number of citations, he has been recognized as a “World’s Top 1% Highly Cited Researcher (HCR)” by Clarivate Analytics since 2018, maintaining this distinction for six consecutive years.
In addition, Professor Seok co-founded Frontier Energy Solution (FES) with fellow academics, leading efforts to commercialize perovskite solar cell technology. Recently, he collaborated with German researchers to develop machine learning-based techniques to enhance the efficiency of PSCs, with the results published in Science.
Professor Seok expressed his appreciation, saying, “I have been invited by Friedrich Alexander University in Germany, where I participated in joint research collaborations.” He added, “I plan to visit Germany as part of my Humboldt Award activities, and I hope this research will contribute to the advancement of next-generation energy technologies.”
