SEOUL, October 23 (AJP) - Ten faculty members at Sookmyung Women's University have been named to this year's list of the world's most-cited researchers, a ranking compiled by Stanford University and the Amsterdam-based academic publisher Elsevier.
The list, released Oct. 7, ranks scientists by a composite citation score drawn from Scopus, Elsevier's database of academic papers. The score combines how often a researcher's work is cited, their h-index, a measure of how many of their papers have each been cited at least that many times, and adjustments for co-authorship and author position. Researchers who score in the top 2 percent of their subfield, across 174 subfields, make the list. The 2026 edition uses citation data through the end of 2025.
The ranking has two categories. Six Sookmyung faculty appeared in the single-year category, which measures research impact over the most recent year, and five in the career-long category, which measures impact across an entire career. Kim Yoon-young, a distinguished professor in the School of Mechanical Systems Engineering, was named in both.
The university said the result showed its faculty competing at an international level in fields ranging from mechanical engineering and pharmacy to artificial intelligence and software. Sookmyung President Moon Si-yeun said the university would "continue to support the research activities of outstanding researchers and strengthen research competitiveness by promoting interdisciplinary and international joint research."
Kim Yoon-young has spent his career designing mechanical devices from the principles of mechanics. His recent work applies AI to what he calls autonomous design, in which software, rather than an engineer, works out the shape of a machine part. He also studies acoustic metamaterials, engineered structures that can generate and steer ultrasound with high precision, and uses them to detect hidden structural flaws in machinery without taking it apart.
Three of the other single-year names come from the university's pharmacy faculty.
Kang Kyo-bin uses mass spectrometry, a technique that identifies molecules by weight, to find and study natural compounds made by plants and microbes. He recently described an open-source method for analyzing drug metabolism data in Nature Protocols, and identified a new sugar-linking enzyme in wood-decay fungi in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Kim Do-hee maps the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other large biological molecules to understand how they work. Her focus is structure-based drug discovery, which uses the shape of a disease-linked protein to design medicines that fit it.
Kim Tae-hyun studies the molecular processes behind metabolic liver disease, drug-induced liver damage and age-related illness. His lab looks at how organs signal to one another, how exercise changes metabolism and how the liver repairs itself after injury, with the aim of finding new markers for diagnosis and new targets for treatment.
The single-year list also includes Yoon Yo-han, a professor of food and nutrition, and Park Soo-hyun, an assistant professor in the School of Software.
Park works on quantum AI, which applies the principles of quantum computing to machine learning. Her research includes using quantum reinforcement learning, a method in which software learns by trial and error, to cut the energy use of satellite networks, and using quantum entanglement to train AI models spread across many devices. She received an early-career researcher award in 2025 from a technical committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional body for electrical and computing engineers.
On the career-long list, Yang Mi-hee, a professor of pharmacy, has studied how carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals affect the human body and how to counter them. Drawing on her patents and published work, she has applied to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) for approval of a health supplement designed to reduce harm from fine dust. She plans to turn next to long-term monitoring of PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that persist in the environment and the body.
Kim Byung-gyu, a professor in the School of Artificial Intelligence Engineering, builds AI that reads images, sound and language together. He is developing empathetic AI, meant to recognize human emotion and context, and world models, which let machines understand physical space and movement. A paper from his lab on generating realistic facial reactions was accepted for oral presentation at ACM Multimedia 2026, a major international computing conference, and placed second in a related challenge, according to the university.
Two emeritus professors of pharmacy round out the list. Ryu Jae-ha, who taught at Sookmyung for 32 years, has searched plant materials for compounds that fight cancer, obesity, diabetes and muscle disease. He is now working to commercialize a food ingredient for age-related muscle loss, a technology already licensed to industry.
Kang Young-sook has spent her career on one of medicine's hardest delivery problems, getting drugs past the blood-brain barrier, the protective layer of cells that keeps most substances in the bloodstream out of the brain. Her work has targeted treatments for dementia, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. In 2022, she published findings in the Journal of Biomedical Science showing that valproic acid, a common epilepsy drug, protected nerve cells in experimental models of the disease.
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