Impressions from ICMRI

Last Thursday-Saturday (March 24-26) there was the 4th International Congress on Magnetic Resonance Imaging at Grand Hilton Hotel in Seoul. First of all, I must thank the organizers at KSMRM for their hard work to prepare this very respectful meeting with hundreds of participants. As a first-time participant, I can only guess its past trajectory but I did come away with an impression that lots of effort has gone into the meeting over the years to make it this well organized and resourceful.
1. Dual language meeting. I thought it made sense to have explicit Korean and English language sessions in the conference. This does emphasize however the need for Korean professionals to be proficient in two languages. Foreign language speakers may still see it as a barrier to participating, but given many medical doctors in the audience who use only Korean in their work, it was probably a right balance.
2. The lecture by Dr. Cho Janghee was eye-opening when he showed the early 2 T scanner with a home-made gradient coil at KAIST. How does this fit into the history of MRI told by GE? How can IBS/SKKU be another history maker in MRI in ten years?
3. SKKU made a good show in the meeting, thanks to the hard work of the graduate students and postdocs who got numerous scientific recognitions for their presentations. Dr. Seong-gi Kim delivered a very comprehensible Korean lecture on CEST. I feel that the school and the institute got much needed visibility reinforcement during the past few days.
4. Unfortunately, there was no good planform for job postings.


I found a small number of presentations that had QSM components in them. It will be useful to follow up on these works.

World Brain Week

Last week was apparently a "World Brain Awareness Week" https://www.sfn.org/baw/ of the year. I was one of the 6 speakers at an event held in Aju University Medical School on Saturday March 19th. It was open to the general public, and the diligent Korean high school students were the majority in the audience. They are said to get some kind of credit from attending such events, and accordingly, the speech contents were much tailored to young and aspiring students. AND all address was given in Korean, which is a challenge to prepare, but as far as I can tell, all speakers I saw (I only attended the first half of the meeting but I have no doubt that the rest of the speakers did well too) did an excellent job in delivering the talk.

In retrospect, I feel that I have unintentionally ignored the adult listeners in the audience. I should have been more neutral to the age of the listeners, and have avoided sounding like a teacher talking to a minor. Profs Suh Minah and Choi Myungwhan did do an excellent job talking about their optical methods of animal brain imaging and studies. Many questions from the students were directed to Prof. Choi, on opto-genetics.

Highlights of the week, March 7-11

The second week of the first semester at the University was pretty dynamic and interesting. Prof. JB Jang finally made his appearance in the department, and delivered a much-attended undergraduate seminar on his work. On Wednesday this year's Neuro-at-Noon series was kicked off by Prof. Kim CJ of KIST/UST who gave a very understandable and interesting talk on brain volume and intelligence. The lunch meeting that followed was attended by many faculty members of the department, and was highly informative.

The undergraduate sophomores started to look for and join research labs to start their work on undergraduate thesis. I was contacted by two of them, and they are likely to meet with me regularly to discuss plans and progress soon. I understand that even the freshmen are supposed to work on a limited scope research supervised by a faculty. As one research project topic for either the 1st or the 2nd year students, I am thinking of an MR magnetometry experiment on Korean currency bills, with an eye on looking for a magnetic printout solution for small volume shimming.

There was a BME faculty dinner meeting at an upscale restaurant in a nearby city overlooking a lake.

On Friday I met with a former classmate who is now on the faculty of Gacheon University. The stories I am exposed to these days through these meetings are all interesting. They are both new and old, as a matter of fact, in the sense that they tell a story in a part of the world, and a corner of the society that are directly opposite to where I was in in the past several years, while at the same time that corner of the world and society is familiar to me from my faraway past so I can quickly understand why things are as I hear they are.

Semester begins!

The 2016 Spring semster started this week. The department, the center, and the school are now busier with new and returning students and staff and faculty who came from the vacation and started to keep regular business hours. And, of course the most obvious difference for the academic staff is that the teaching schedule started. The first class for me, for graduate students on MRI engineering, went fairly well, I think. I also delivered the first BME undergraduate seminar for the second-year undergraduate students. Returning to a Korean classroom nearly 17 years after I left for California, now as a teacher, gives me a very special feeling. I was hoping to be able to be effective in both languages, but I must admit, doing all that with proper preparation of the lecture materials is quite a task. I do feel that given enough time, I would be one of those who would enjoy teaching. Hope the students felt the same.

A few first impressions:
1. Internet makes it easy to find pictures for the lecture slides, on any subject.
2. There is a clear discrepency between the international language requirement by the University and the preference of both the students and the lecturers in the classroom.
3. I do feel that it would be helpful to have a definite class textbook (or a reader printout) for the graduent class I am running. This will improve as course develops.
4. Being able to address the students, albeit demanding, is a privilege, and a big and unmeasurable one.