We had two bits of good news at the end of last year. The first was that ten UNIST professors had been selected for the ‘List of Highly Cited Researches (HCR) in the Top 1%’ announced by Clarivate, a global information analysis company. Three more people than the previous year were chosen this time around, with the result that UNIST ranked No. 1 in Korea. Considering the size of the university, the fact that 10 out of 60 HCRs in Korea belong to UNIST is an amazing achievement. And the second bit of news was that UNIST’s startup company, Recens Medical, had won the US$5 million Export Tower Award. Recens Medical has proven the excellence of its rapid-cooling medical device, which it succeeded in developing by itself within just five years of its establishment.

As the president of UNIST, I couldn’t hide my joy. Indeed I was over the moon because both extremes, which have been focused on making UNIST a research-oriented university, have been successful. UNIST aims both to win the Nobel Prize in Basic Research and to produce companies like Google through industry-academia innovation.
UNIST dreams of becoming a research-oriented university that will change the future of Ulsan. A world-class university can change the future of a city, a region, and even a country. The history of Silicon Valley speaks for itself. Behind the birth of Silicon Valley, the world’s leading source of global innovation, lay a powerful research-oriented university equipped with world-class researchers.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Stanford University was founded, the western states in America were like an empty field. Competent young graduates of Standford University, which was established with the aim of becoming a prestigious university in the west, normally headed east to find a job at that time.
It was Frederick Terman who changed all this. Appointed to Stanford University in 1925, Terman was an excellent researcher as well as an innovator who emphasized the university’s need for entrepreneurship. While serving as the dean of the school of engineering and provost at Stanford University, Terman established an industrial-academia cooperation complex at the university, which was surrounded by apple trees at that time, and emphasized the importance of business start-ups. Against this background, HP Inc., which was founded in 1939 by two Stanford graduates, Hewlett and Packard, is considered the starting point of Silicon Valley. That’s why Terman is nicknamed the “father of Silicon Valley”. There is another person who should be credited for the establishment of Silicon Valley, namely, William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Shockley suggested the concept of a new transistor and opened the door to the semiconductor industry. Raised in California, Shockley gained a reputation after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for research he conducted at Bell Laps in the east. After Terman’s innovation, Shockley opened a research institute near Stanford University and assembled personnel for research on semiconductors. Many talented people from Caltech, Stanford University, and MIT came to the research institute, went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, and then established many leading semiconductor companies including Intel, thus creating the legend of Silicon Valley.

UNIST, which was created with the high aspirations of Ulsan’s citizens, has gone through tremendous advances since its foundation, thanks to the full support of Ulsan City and Ulju County. With the vision of becoming a world-class research-oriented university, the UCRF (UNIST Central Research Facilities), which is equipped with the very best facilities, has recruited many excellent researchers. Gamakgol, which was originally just an empty field, today, now has some 300 world-class professors and about 5,000 students and researchers. A research-oriented university is a magnet for talented people. Outstanding domestic and foreign researchers and students come to Ulsan to join UNIST. Every year, some 200 institutions use the UCRF’s equipment to receive the results of around 6,000 analyses. And more than 110 companies come to the UNIST AI Innovation Park to take part in artificial intelligence innovation.
UNIST’s researchers are like Terman and Shockley. Professor Kim Geon-ho leads Recens Medical, winner of the US$5 million Export Tower Award. Professor Cho Jae-pil has established a secondary battery material company in Ulju County and attracted more than KRW 100 billion in investment. Biotechnology research, including genome research, has allowed Ulsan’s bio industry to flourish, while the UNIST Graduate School of Semiconductor Materials and Devices Engineering, which opened last year, is raising the possibility of a new industry in Ulsan, previously a barren field for semiconductors.

UNIST’s dream is to make Ulsan a melting pot of innovation like Silicon Valley. As such, UNIST must play a key role in achieving Ulsan’s dream of taking a giant leap towards becoming a global center of innovation, reaching beyond the glory of being an industrial capital. To this end, UNIST must continuously secure the best faculty, especially those studying new areas. If we fail to scale up and bring in excellent young professors, our university will lose its dynamism. We cannot delay in securing state-of-the-art equipment because we cannot lead the future with old or obsolete equipment. We must attract bold investments with the idea of establishing the second UCRF.

• the UCRF (UNIST Central Research Facilities), which is equipped with the very best facilities, has recruited many excellent researchers. Gamakgol, which was originally just an empty field, today, now has some 300 world-class professors and about 5,000 students and researchers.
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So let’s dream together of a future when Ulsan will represent the world! We are already getting closer to our dream. I look forward to hearing the news that we are one step closer to realizing our dream in 2023.