Hyeon Taeghwan

Taeghwan Hyeon (born in 1964) is a South Korean chemist.

He is SNU distinguished professor in the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University, director of Center for Nanoparticle Research of Institute for Basic Science (IBS), and an associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Hyeon is recognized by his pioneering work in chemical synthesis of uniformly sized nanocrystals and various applications of functional nanomaterials.

He received his B.A. degree in 1987 and M.S. in 1989 from Chemistry Department of Seoul National University, and Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996 under the supervision of Kenneth S. Suslick.

At Illinois Hyeon studied sonochemical synthesis of nanostructured catalytic and magnetic materials.

From June 1996 to July 1997, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Wolfgang M. H. Sachtler group at Northwestern University.

He joined the faculty of the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University in 1997.

Hyeon is a leading scientist in the area of synthesis, assembly, and biomedical applications of uniformly sized nanoparticles.

In particular, his research group developed a new generalized synthetic strategy, called “heat-up process”, for producing uniform-sized nanoparticles of many transition metals and oxides without a size selection process.

With this simple and inexpensive method, his group went on to design and fabricate multifunctional nanostructured materials for biomedical applications.

Hyeon developed a new T1 MRI contrast agent using biocompatible manganese oxide (MnO) nanoparticles, exhibiting detailed anatomic structures of mouse brain.

His group reported on the fabrication of monodisperse magnetite nanoparticles immobilized with uniform pore-sized mesoporous silica spheres for simultaneous MRI, fluorescence imaging, and drug delivery.

In 2011, he was listed as the 37th most cited chemist and the 19th in materials science among “Top 100 Chemists” of the decade by UNESCO&IUPAC.

He has published over 350 papers in prominent international journals with more than 70,000 citations and an h-index of 137.

The first demonstration of high-resolution in vivo three-photon imaging using biocompatible and bright Mn2+ doped ZnS nanocrystals was published in 2013.

Uniformly sized iron oxide nanoclusters could be successfully used as T1 MR contrast agent for high-resolution MR angiography of macaque monkeys.

His research interests also includes engineering the architecture of nanomaterials and utilizing them in lithium ion battery, fuel cell electrocatalysts, solar cells, and thermoelectrics.

The group reported in 2013 the first demonstration of galvanic replacement reactions in metal oxide nanocrystals, and were able to synthesize hollow nanocrystals of various multimetallic oxides including Mn3O4/γ-Fe2O3.

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He has delivered more than 30 invited lectures in conferences sponsored by the Materials Research Society, American Chemical Society, and Gordon Research Conferences, and more than 20 invited lectures at UC-Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, and Columbia.

Since 2014, he has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher in chemistry and materials science by Clarivate Analytics and became a Clarivate Citation Laureate in 2020.

Hyeon was born in Dalseong County, Daegu, South Korea.