Professor Yoonsang Yoo of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Yonsei University has been selected for the 2025 Excellent Young Researcher Program, which is organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT and supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea. The topic of this research is “Wave-based Computational Metasurface Transceiver for Implementation of 6G Intelligent Extreme Large-scale Massive MIMO Sensing and Communication Systems,” and the research aims to establish foundational studies for next-generation intelligent sensing and communication systems by leveraging metamaterials/metasurfaces and artificial intelligence (AI). The project duration is three years, with a total research funding of 875 million KRW.

This research, in particular, will be conducted as an international collaborative project with world-class researchers in the fields of metamaterials/metasurfaces and imaging (Duke University in the U.S., Queen’s University Belfast in the U.K., and the University of Limoges in France). Professor Yoo’s research team was selected last year for the Korea-EU Cooperation Promotion Program and has since been conducting a joint project with the same European research institutions (Queen’s University Belfast in the U.K. and the University of Limoges in France). Through this Excellent Young Researcher Program, they are expected to continue even more active global collaborative research.

Meanwhile, the Excellent Young Researcher Program by the National Research Foundation of Korea is a national support program that aims to foster future leaders in academic disciplines by supporting the original research of outstanding early-career researchers. The competition for the 2025 first-half selection was known to be highly competitive.