Submission results, on-line class, and KSMRM board meeting

One of the things that have always been conducted on-line is academic paper publication. Out of the four (new and revised) papers submitted in March, two were accepted without further revision (yeah!), one was rejected (sigh..), and one was given a revision request. While the team in the Lab and the collaborators worked on the manuscripts, the on-line class on electricity and magnetism went on, and already 1/2 of the course has been covered. The midterm exam, scheduled for next week, will in fact be replaced by an extended homework, to be completed remotely ("at home"), and graded with weights higher than regular homeworks.
The first KSMRM board meeting of 2020 was held on the April 13th, on-line. This is normally held during the icMRI conference at the end of March, but this year, it had to take place separately. The on-line meeting platform "zoom" was used, smoothly, to give chance for the Society's (incumbent and incoming) chairs and board members to greet each other on a video call.

Submissions and recordings

While the school is barely open for activities and with many meetings delayed or cancelled, the Lab has been busy to write up research results and submit manuscripts to academic journals. In the past 3 weeks, four separate papers (all with at least one person in the Lab being a main author) have been submitted to: J Parkinson's Disease, Scientific Reports, Medical Physics, and J Korean Physical Society. Relatively empty calendars and flexible work hours helped researchers focus on manuscript preparation, where most of the work was editing (.ppt), coding (.m), and writing (.doc). Regarding teaching of the courses, the first week of the semester has been entirely run on-line, with narrated ppt files and recorded videos uploaded on a school server. The BME electromagnetics course now has 4 lectures (each between 40 ~ 60 min) recorded and uploaded. On-line teaching will continue for at least 3 more weeks. The digital lecture materials will find ways for use outside the courses, and be subject to all the goods and ills of digital contents (easy editing, sharing, but easy copying and misleading quotations).

SARS-CoV-2 disruption

The official name is SARS-CoV-2. It is the virus that causes a respiratory disease named CoViD-19. This de-facto pandemic is now causing significant disruption in school routines. It appears to be a matter of time that a significant portion of the N Center be blocked from entry due to need to disinfect areas touched by some infected people. As of 3/2, the university has implemented a policy to ban entry to all buildings without a mask. Classes for the first two semester weeks, starting from 3/9, will be entirely given on-line. All the teaching staff were asked to upload recorded video files for the first week's lectures. As to research activities, some BME labs have recommended graduate students to stay home for a while. On-line data connectivity in Korea is highly developed, accessible, and well utilized by all students. This is definitely a help to relieve headaches of many who must work from home. No quick ending of the disruption is in sight. Even after this incident is over, remote on-line working is likely going to be more and more prevalent and be crucial to how people do business in this age.

2020 begins with opportunities and some ... confusion.

First of all, the winter of 2019 ~ 2020 has been unusually warm. This is generally a good news for university employees and students. But then there came a corona virus scare, from about January 20th, which caused cancellations and postponements of a host of events. They include: graduation ceremony, college admission ceremony and freshmen welcome nights, annual scientific meeting of KSMRM, and other research meetings, formal and informal. On top of that, the university announced that the first week of the 2020 Spring semester will be delayed by one week, to March 9th, and even then the first two weeks will only have on-line classes, with recorded or streaming videos, so the students stay home. This is unprecedented, and effectively extended the winter vacation. While confusing, a positive side of this unusual happenings is, of course, more research time for the month of February, provided the virus outbreak should remain under control.

In terms of  opportunities, the GBME department has recently received a government grant for overseas trainee fellowship for graduate students and post-docs. In the Lab, Hyeong-Seop Kim is planning to spend 6 to 12 months in US to learn MRI RF coil design and fabrication. Separately, the Ministry of Education is accepting applications for a relatively large-scale educational grant, called Brain Korea IV, the 4th version of a popular, 7-year financial support program for the nation's graduate schools. Several faculty members of the BME department are working to draft the proposal, to be submitted by mid-April.

2019 year-end photo opportunities

Year-end parties for the department, IBS-CNIR, and the MRI laboratory provided photo opportunities in the latter half of December. Jun-Ho Kim, in particular, was featured in a university research news for his work on spherical phantoms, which also appeared in an external media.

Meeting with GBME undergraduate students

The medical devices faculty of the GBME department held an undergraduate student Q&A session on Friday Dec 20 in a meeting room at the N Center. About 25 students attended, a majority being freshmen, with strong interest to share questions and concerns about their academic and career matters with peers and the faculty. The session was the first of the kind in the department, and was run smoothly thanks to the very helpful advices, candid answers, and supportive comments from the professors including the department chair Jang-Yeon Park. It is hoped that this meeting would stimulate more dialogues in the future between the students and the faculty of the department, as the department moves forward into its 6th year of foundation in 2020.

KSMRM year-end meeting in Gwangju

A workshop and social gathering took place on December 6-7 in Gwangju, Jeollanam-do, celebrating the year's end among the PhD members of the Korean Society of the Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Well-known for the exquisite culinary selections and traditions, the city of Gwangju was very well-received by the participants as an excellent choice for the venue of this event. A special thanks goes to Prof. Il-Woo Park, of Chonnam University, who took care of all the logistics of the two-day meeting. The workshop was held in a conference room inside the Chonnam University Hospital campus, and covered research lectures (Prof. Sung-Hong Park and others), society journal (iMRI) updates (Prof. Jaeseok Park), and discussions on next year's medical device funding from the Korean government (Prof. Yong-Min Chang). About 20 PhDs took part in the event, and had a good time exchanging professional information and personal greetings.