Kim Sung-gi, IBS Director, Awarded Gold Medal at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)

The Institute for Basic Science (Director Noh Do Young) announced on the 7th that Kim Sung Ki, head of the Brain Science Imaging Research Group (Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University), received the highest honor, the Gold Medal, at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), the world's premier academic conference in the MRI field.

Sungki Kim, Director of the IBS Brain Science Imaging Research Center

The ISMRM Gold Medal is an award recognizing major research contributions in the field of magnetic resonance and is given annually to the top 2 to 4 researchers. Kim is the first scientist in the magnetic resonance (MR) field from Asia to receive this award. He was recognized for his contributions to understanding the fundamental physiological basis of fMRI signals through human and animal studies.

Kim was one of the first scientists to apply functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to humans in 1992. He held the Paul Lauterbur Distinguished Professorship at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States but returned to South Korea to advance brain science and joined IBS in 2013.

Kim is conducting research to elucidate the correlation between phenomena occurring in brain cells and the signals captured by MRI. His representative achievements include developing new MRI methods to measure cerebral blood flow and blood volume, clarifying the relationships among brain cell activity, changes in blood flow and blood volume, and fMRI signals, as well as identifying causal relationships in information processing between activated brain regions.