February 2012

More than 25 years ago Hongshik Ahn left Seoul National University in Korea for his Masters in Statistics at UC Berkeley, charting a new path that he never expected to come full circle. Four years after finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he arrived at Stony Brook's Department of Applied Math and Statistics (AMS), currently ranked #10 in the US for its graduate programs by the NRC (and #1 in student diversity), to begin the long trek to becoming a full professor.

And a well liked professor at that. While Rate My Professors is viewed with disdain by faculty, it is very rare when a student doesn't check it. Aside from getting a 'hot chili', Ahn's high ranking (4.1 out of 5) is not from being an 'easy A' (3.5) but rather for "clarity" (4.5). Students write of how he can take an incredibly boring subject like statistics and make it an interesting and worthwhile course while breaking the tedium of calculations and formulas with his sense of humor. All of which fits in perfectly with why he left his first job as a researcher at the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research - he missed teaching - and why he has won numerous Outstanding Teacher Awards over the years!

Ahn married Hyesun, who had immigrated to Gaithersburg, Maryland as a young child, and together they raised two ABK's, daughter Suejin, a senior at Duke, and son Andrew, a freshman at Northwestern. Serendipitously, it was his desire to be home for his son's last two years of high school that put him in a position to become Vice President of SUNY Korea, Stony Brook's newest venture into Asia. He had delayed his sabbatical and upon submitting his application to spend a semester doing research with KAIST, the Korea Advanced  Institute of Science and Technology, SBU's Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences suggested he do research at CEWIT Korea too. So last summer Hongshik added the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology to his itinerary. 

While at CEWIT Korea the Korean government approved SUNY Korea. A concept that had been in the works for years had finally come to fruition. While purposely named SUNY Korea rather than Stony Brook Korea to give faculty from throughout the SUNY system the opportunity to teach there, it had been Stony Brook's brainchild. Two Electrical Engineering Ph.D. minds had melded to spearhead its creation, CEAS alumnus Dr. Myung Oh (SBU '72), former Deputy Prime Minister and considered the "godfather" of Korea's telecommunications revolution, and CEAS Dean Yacov Shamash, (Imperial College, '73), SBU's VP of Economic Development.   

SUNY Korea's President, Dr. Choonho Kim, realized Ahn would be a perfect partner. As a bi-lingual American university graduate, SBU/SUNY professor and researcher, Ahn exemplifies exactly what SUNY Korea wants to create - a university that blends the best of Eastern and Western educational systems and research opportunities and whose graduates bridge multiple cultures - a truly global university. Returning to NY together in September, they asked Shamash for his blessing and the new position was created. 

Ahn has high hopes for what he will be able to help accomplish before he comes back in two years to his family in the US. "I would like to try my best to really establish the SUNY Korea programs. SUNY Korea is planning to add more CEAS graduate programs such as AMS and Mechanical Engineering, a Quantitative Finance certificate program, and start the undergraduate program in the near future. I hope all this expansion can be made successfully while I am there."

Being an administrator is a new role for Ahn, one he admits is an interesting challenge. "I left Korea to study abroad after I finished my undergraduate degree," he said, "so I didn't have working experience in Korea. The working environment of CEWIT Korea and SUNY Korea was totally new to me from the view of an American professor, and it has been a learning experience." As this new SUNY Korea venture unfolds it will be a new learning experience for many faculty and administrators from both continents.

SBU's Provost Dennis Assanis talked of the importance of Ahn's role at SUNY Korea: "As Vice President of SUNY Korea, LLC, Professor Hongshik Ahn assists the LLC's President, Dr. Choonho Kim, in the day-to-day operations of SUNY Korea on the SGU campus. Professor Ahn is the primary point of contact between SBU's main campus in the United States and the academic programs on the SGU campus. As a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook, Professor Ahn will play a primary role in ensuring that Stony Brook's academic standards and qualities of excellence are maintained in the delivery of our programs in Korea." 

While Ahn had to give up research this past semester, research, like teaching, is where his heart is and he will return to it next semester. He never even really quit the National Center for Toxicological Research, returning to Arkansas each summer until 2010 to work on classification of high-dimensional genomic data with the researchers there. When you look at all the projects he has worked on, is working on, and the new ones that will happen in Korea, he is an incredibly diversified PI. 

While you may not have heard of Ahn's name, you have heard of one of the studies he was involved in because it made international news last year - whether laptops are dangerous for male sperm. They are. Males using laptops will generally experience scrotal hyperthermia, which is elevated temperatures in their testicles. This can damage their sperm and thus decrease their fertility. While there are various ways to lesson the damage, in the end the safest protection is to use a laptop on a desk and forget it's a laptop at all.

Ahn is currently working on two interesting but very different projects and already has plans to work on another with Korea's Transportation Agency. 
---At the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center and Stony Brook Medical Center he is collaborating with Dr. Atul Kumar on a Clinical Decision Support System to help doctors deal with patients who have gastrointestinal bleeding. It will be used to classify patients in emergency situations where doctors must make a decision quickly before a patient dies. The most important aspect of the research is to show that where the bleeding source is will determine such things as whether an endoscopy should be performed or not and whether the patient needs to be in ICU immediately or not. 
---At InSPIRES, the Institute for Social and Psychiatric Initiatives - Education, Research and Services at NYU's Langone Medical Center, he is involved in research on PARS, paternal age related schizophrenia. They have already determined, for example, that the older the father was when his child was conceived, the higher the likelihood of schizophrenia due to mutation of sperm in older males.
---In Korea he will be doing research with the Highway Traffic Agency to predict traffic volumes and traffic behavior in the future. Working with CEWIT Korea they plan to use the results to develop a web application to help motorists.

And in a best of both worlds scenario, while Ahn will be teaching at SUNY Korea for the next two years, SB students will not have to miss having him as a great teacher too! SUNY Korea built video teleconferencing lecture rooms in Korea and will be replicating them at SB. In future semesters his courses can be taught there or here - all part of making SUNY Korea a truly global campus.

by Ja Young
Alumni Editor

About Hongshik Ahn:
-Official website: Includes C.V. and all research projects, grants, publications, awards, etc. www.ams.sunysb.edu/~hahn/
-"Protection from scrotal hyperthermia in laptop computer users" in Fertility and Sterility, 2011.  http://blog.communityfertility.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/scrotal_temperature_study.pdf

Special Series: SUNY Korea  www.aaezine.org/SUNYKorea/