Merck Korea Honors Researchers at IMID 2026
Merck Korea announced the winners of its prestigious Merck Award at the International Meeting on Information Display (IMID) 2026 in Busan. The award ceremony took place on August 20, with Merck Korea naming Kyungpook National University Professor Hak-Rin Kim as the winner of the 2026 Merck Award and Seoul National University Professor Soo-Yeon Lee as the recipient of the 2026 Merck Young Scientist Award.
The Merck Award was established in 2004 to recognize scientific achievements in the display field. The awards have undergone significant changes over the years, shifting from paper awards to academic awards in 2013 and expanding their scope beyond displays to include optoelectronics technologies this year.
Kim's research focuses on active-switching polarization optics, geometric-phase optical devices, holographic imaging, and extended reality (XR) display optics based on liquid crystals and curable liquid-crystal materials. He has made significant contributions to the industrial application of his research through industry-academia collaboration and technology consulting with major Korean display companies.
Lee's research has focused on oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) devices and circuit technologies. She has proposed device structures that suppress short-channel effects in oxide TFTs and conducted research on device degradation modeling and panel compensation technologies.