Sei Kwang Hahn

Biography

Sei Kwang Hahn is the Seok Cheon Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Bioscience and Bioengineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). He obtained his B.S. (1991), M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1996) in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). As the youngest Ph.D. at LG Chemical Group in 1996, he started his research for the commercial development of the sustained release formulation of hGH under the trade name of Declage®. After that, he did his post-doctoral research with Prof. Allan Hoffman in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington for 2001-2002. He worked at the Hoffman-La Roche group, Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. in Japan for 2002-2005. After joining at POSTECH in 2005, he worked as a consultant for Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey in 2008, an associate visiting professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital for 2012-2013, and a visiting professor at Stanford University for 2019-2020. He is the founder and CEO of PHI BIOMED Co., one of the National Innovative Enterprise 1000 nominated by the Korean Minister of SMEs and Startups. He won the Best National Convergence Technology Award in 2023, the prestigious Medical Industry Grand Prize and Song-Gok Science & Technology Award in 2022, the Controlled Release Society Award in 2018, the Minister of Health and Welfare Award in 2017, and the Korean President Award in 2015. He was the Samsung Future Technology Committee for 2016-2018 and the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology for 2017-2019. He was nominated as the National Academy of Engineering of Korea in 2020, the Outside Director of Kiswire Co. in 2020, the Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering for the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBSE) in 2023, and the Vice President for the Polymer Society of Korea in 2024. He published more than 180 journal papers including Nature Reviews Materials, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Progress in Polymer Science, and Advanced Materials, and filed more than 150 Korean and international patents. He has worked as the Editorial Board Member of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering, ACS Applied Bio Materials, Biomacromolecules and Advanced Nanobiomed Research, the Guest Editor of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, Biomaterials, Journal of Controlled Release and APL Materials, and the Associate Editor of Biomaterials Research (IF 11.3) and Biomaterials (IF 14.0)