Kowhang Emeritus Professor Jong-hwan Lim of the Department of Food and Nutrition and Professor Sangwon Park of Smart Tourism Education Platform (STEP) joined the 2022 Highly Cited Researchers

Professors Jong-hwan Lim and Sang-Won Park were named among the 2022 World’s Top 1% Highly Cited Researcher (HCR) by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters).

Clarivate Analytics uses the Web of Science database provided by Clarivate Analytics for the annual nomination of HCRs. Research results up to ten years prior to the selection year are considered; this year, published articles and number of citations between 2011 and 2021 were analyzed to nominate a total of 7,225 researchers from around the world in 22 academic fields.

Professor Jong-hwan Lim, a leading authority in the development of biodegradable and functional nanocomposite packaging materials
Professor Lim was selected in the field of Agricultural Science, as he has been a leading authority in the field of biodegradable and functional nanocomposite packaging materials. He has published more than 240 papers in domestic and international academic journals over the past 30 years. In 2019, he won the 5th Daesang Hanlim Food Science Award in recognition of his research achievements. He is also the winner of 2014 Korea Food Packaging Society Academic Award, the 2015 Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning Knowledge Creation Award, and the 2017 Korea Food Science Society Academic Award. Professor Lim has been named as an HCR for seven consecutive years since 2016.

Professor Lim has devoted most of his career to the development of functional biodegradable packaging materials using biopolymers. Packaging materials made with biopolymers made from proteins or carbohydrates extracted from animals and plants are naturally degradable while being safe for human consumption and animal feed. The development of biodegradable plastics is becoming increasingly crucial environmentally and commercially as a way to solve the problem of waste microplastics in the wild.

Professor Sangwon Park is building a Korean tourism industry system through research on marketing, technology, and big data
Professor Park, who came to Kyung Hee in 2021, was named as an HCR in the field of social science. Previously, he taught at the University of Surrey in the UK and the University of Technology in Hong Kong. He also received the Rookie of the Year award in the field of tourism from the International Academy of the Study of Tourism in 2019. In early 2022, he received the IFITT 2021 Journal Paper of the Year Award at the ENTER21 conference hosted by the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) for his article titled, “Spatial structures of tourism destinations: A trajectory data mining approach leveraging mobile big data” published in Annals of Tourism Research.

Professor Park's main research interests include hotel tourism marketing, technology, and big data. He said, “I came back to Korea after 20 years with the appointment at Kyung Hee, and I set a personal goal of establishing a system for the Korean tourism industry. We are trying to raise Korea's tourism to a level that other countries will benchmark. Based on my experience in a number of projects with the British Ministry of Economy and the Hong Kong government, I have conducted tourism analysis projects using big data in cooperation with the Korea Tourism Organization and Jeju Tourism Organization with promising results.”

It is reported that Kyung Hee has a total of 45 researchers in the top 2% of the world this year. According to data released by Elsevier, an academic research publication and information analysis company in the fields of science, technology, and medicine, 45 researchers who are currently at the University were listed in the world's top 2% researchers in 174 sub-subject areas in 22 academic fields. This is the result of analyzing the impact of paper citations until 2021 based on Scopus, the world's largest paper citation database.