Professor Hwan-Jeong Jeong (Department of Nuclear Medicine, Medical School) and his research team have recently been selected, in succession, for national programs that appoint leading researchers, attracting attention from the academic community.

Professor Jeong's team was recently selected for the 2012 Second Radiation Technology Development Project, organized by the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Last year, Professor Jeong's team was also selected for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology's mid-career researcher support program and was designated a national leading research laboratory. Under the current selection, the team will receive sole funding of approximately KRW 750 million from the National Research Foundation of Korea over three years to conduct research that leads the nation.

This project selection followed the National Research Foundation of Korea's selection of a total of 18 projects under the Radiation Technology Development Project across the fields of radiation-convergence technology, radiation medical technology, and advanced nondestructive testing technology.

Six bottom-up projects were selected in the radiation medicine field, and Professor Jeong's team's application was honored to be included among them.

Professor Jeong's team overcame a high competition ratio of 8:1 with a study aimed at developing a new medical technology that devises and applies a radiation-convergence smart therapeutic system as a novel treatment approach for ischemic diseases caused by vascular abnormalities.

Professor Jeong's team, which has been conducting research to diagnose and treat intractable diseases through advanced molecular imaging-convergence research, stated that through this project they plan to construct a new radiation-convergence smart therapeutic system for treating vascular-abnormality–related conditions such as myocardial infarction and cerebral infarction. They aim to develop a new-concept medical technology that allows treatment to be performed while verifying the process via imaging, and to expand the research toward application in actual patient care.

Meanwhile, Professor Hwan-Jeong Jeong and other faculty members of the Department of Nuclear Medicine, Medical School (Chair Professor Myung-Hee Son) have set a collaborative research direction and goal to establish a medical cluster, and they are continuously working to achieve it.

These efforts have yielded results, including 39 research papers published in prestigious international journals over the past three years; the signing of three industry–university–hospital collaborative research agreements and the opening of joint laboratories; the transfer of research technologies to industry on two occasions as fruits of the collaborative research; and the continued selection for national mid- to large-scale research projects, including the present project. These accomplishments are expected to lead to even greater achievements and development in the future.