Lee Kwang-hee, born in 1960, is a South Korean physicist. Since 2007, he has served as the director of the Research Institute for Solar and Sustainable Energy at the

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology The Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) is a research-oriented university focused on science and technology that is located in Gwangju, South Korea. GIST is a member of the research-oriented universities group consisting of GIST-K ...

(GIST).

Biography

Lee is currently a full professor of the Materials Science & Engineering Department and a vice-director of the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials at the

(GIST) in Korea. His major areas of interest include polymer devices such as

polymer A polymer (; Greek '' poly-'', "many" + ''-mer'', "part") is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic a ...

LED A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor Electronics, device that Light#Light sources, emits light when Electric current, current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy i ...

s, polymer solar cells, and polymer FETs using semiconducting and metallic polymers. He received a BS degree from Seoul National University in 1983, and a MS degree from KAIST in 1985. After this, he worked at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute as a Staff Researcher from 1985 to 1990. He moved to the US for his doctorate study in 1990 at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

, in Santa Barbara (UCSB) and obtained his Ph.D. in March 1995 under the supervision of one Professor Alan J. Heeger (the

Nobel laureate in Chemistry The Nobel Prize in Chemistry ( sv, Nobelpriset i kemi) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will and testament ...

in 2000). After finishing his post-doctoral work at

UCSB The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

in 1997, he started his professorship at the

Pusan National University Pusan National University (PNU), also called Busan National University, is one of ten Flagship Korean National Universities in South Korea and second highest public universities in South Korea. Located mainly in Busan (or Pusan), the universi ...

in South Korea. In 2007, Lee moved to his current position of a Full Professor at

GIST In computing, GiST or Generalized Search Tree, is a data structure and API that can be used to build a variety of disk-based search trees. GiST is a generalization of the B+ tree, providing a concurrent and recoverable height-balanced search tree ...

Scientific breakthroughs

*Established a theoretical model of charge dynamics in conducting polymers called the localization modified Drude model. *Produced truly metallic polymers. *Performed the fabrication of all-solution processable tandem polymer solar cells *Internal quantum efficiencies approaching 100% were obtained in his polymer solar cells. *He realized that the conductivity of conducting polymer films was increased by aligning polymer chains. *Used statically charged self-assembled non-conjugated polyelectrolytes as an interfacial layer for inverted polymer solar cells *Key role of interchain coupling in the metallic state of conducting polymersPhysical Review Letters, 109, 106405 (2012)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lee, Kwang-hee 1960 births Living people Seoul National University alumni South Korean physicists University of California, Santa Barbara alumni Academic staff of Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology