South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea said on Tuesday they selected Kim Dongha (김동하), a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Nano Science at Ewha Womans University, as the March winner of the Korea Science and Technology Award.

Kim was recognised for contributing to the fields of optics and nanotechnology through the development of next-generation supramolecular chiral optical materials technology, a fundamental technology that precisely controls the properties of light at the nanoscale. Chirality refers to a property of materials that resemble each other like left and right hands mirrored but are not identical, and is a key factor that determines a material's performance and function.

Kim's team developed a "supramolecular chiral co-assembly platform" that maintains structural stability even under external stimuli by using star-shaped block copolymers as assembly units. The platform maintains structural stability for more than 100 days at room temperature and shows no performance degradation even after repeated heating and cooling. It also achieved highly efficient full-colour circularly polarized light (CPL) emission across the entire visible spectrum, including the red region that had been difficult to realise. The research results were published in the international journal Science in August last year.

The technology is expected to be used in next-generation optical devices including 3D displays, photonic circuits, and information security and anti-counterfeiting.

"Going forward, based on the solid trust and cooperation built with co-researchers, I will continue to establish and share universal principles for designing materials applied across different fields," Kim said.