EDITORIAL
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Prof. Dr. Duk Yong Yoon
D uk Yong Yoon was born in 1940 and spent his early
childhood in Pyongyang, North Korea. When he was
8 years old, he came to South Korea with his family, cross-
ing the closed border between the divided South and North
Koreas. During his final year at Kyunggy High School in
Seoul, Korea, he went to the USA and entered M. I. T. in
1958 to major in physics. He studied French literature as a
minor in humanities. Upon graduating from M. I. T. in
1962, he continued his graduate studies at Harvard Univer-
sity in the Division of Applied Physics and Engineering.
His doctoral thesis work was on the effect of high pressure
on order-disorder transformation in b-CuZn and was super-
vised by Professor A. Bienenstock, who is now at Stanford
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University. He thoroughly enjoyed the academic atmo-
sphere of Harvard and studying under professors like
H. Brooks, D. Turnbull, and W. Paul. In 1967 he went to
the University of Illinois as a post-doctoral research associ-
ate to work with Professor D. Lazarus in the department of
physics. He worked on ionic conductivity in alkali-halides
under high pressure, and the exposure to ionic crystals at
that time led him later to work on ceramic materials. In
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early 1970 he joined the faculty of the Wayne State Univer-
sity in Michigan.
In 1971 the Korean government was establishing the Korea
Advanced Institute of Science (which later became the Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) as a new
leading graduate school. Duk Yong Yoon proposed to estab-
lish a department of materials science at this university and
returned to Korea in January, 1972 as the first faculty in the
department. He enjoyed the challenging task of establishing
a new educational and research organization in Korea, which
was at an early stage of industrialization. Although his educa-
tion and experience in the U. S. A. were mainly in solid state
physics, he decided to start a program in powder metallurgy
because of the industrial demand in Korea. Although it was
necessary to pay attention to practical problems, he realized
that there were many fundamental questions yet to be re-
solved. His students performed critical experiments to ob-
serve the filling of artificially produced spherical pores dur-
ing liquid phase sintering and analyzed the capillary driving
force for such a process. They also studied the coarsening of
spherical grains during liquid phase sintering.
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In 1978, he went to the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Metall-
forschung in Stuttgart to work with Professor Petzow and
Dr. Huppmann as a Humboldt fellow. His work in Stuttgart
showed that the migration of Ni liquid films between W
particles was related to the composition change and was
therefore similar to diffusion-induced grain boundary mi-
gration (DIGM), which was drawing considerable interest.
Various theories were proposed for the driving force of such
interface migration, and Professor M. Hillert suggested that
particularly for intergranular liquid film migration the co-
herency strain energy produced by solute diffusion in front
of the migrating interface was the driving force. Yoon and
his students at KAIST performed the critical test of this the-
ory by using several combinations of solute atom pairs to
vary the coherency strain from negative to positive values
through 0. The solute atom concentrations were varied by
using the equilibria between the solid and liquid phases in
liquid phase sintered systems. Further experiments in cera-
mics showed that the migration directions were also consis-
tent with the coherency strain theory. Duk Yong Yoon al-
ways searched for simple experiments for critical tests of
theories and demonstration of new ideas, and these series
of experiments were the prime examples. He now believes
that the coherency strain theory has been fully verified ex-
perimentally for liquid film and grain boundary migration
as well as for discontinuous precipitation and that some re-
cent results against the theory are due to misunderstanding.
Since 1995, Yoon’s group has been mainly working on
understanding the mechanism of abnormal grain growth.
They showed that the grain shapes in liquid phase sintered
systems often changed from polyhedral to nearly spherical
shapes with either temperature or composition change as
described for the surface roughening of pure materials, and
that the normal or abnormal grain growth was related to
such a grain shape change. Extending the experiments to
pure or single-phase polycrystalline materials, they showed
that the grain boundary roughening transition was also re-
lated to normal or abnormal grain growth. One important
example of this experimental series was the observation that
MgO addition to alumina doped with SiO2 and CaO caused
the grain boundary roughening transition and hence the
change from abnormal to normal grain growth. Yoon be-
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 EDITORIAL
lieves that the puzzle of the MgO effect in alumina has now
been resolved and generally the grain boundary roughening
transition is important for understanding the grain boundary
structure and properties.
Yoon also delved briefly into various other subjects such
as diamond deposition, y’ precipitation in Ni-base superal-
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loy, W heavy alloy, and oxide superconductors, but he
found it difficult to do significant research in these areas.
He often felt academically isolated in Korea and sought to
maintain ties to the international community. He spent sab-
batical years at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology and the General Electric Corporate Research
Center in the U. S. A. and the University of Tokyo in Japan,
and maintained close working relationships with these insti-
tutions as well as the Max-Planck-Institut für Metallfor-
schung in Germany.
Duk Yong Yoon also played a significant role in the
science administration in Korea. He served as the general
secretary of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation
in its early days, establishing the research support and eva-
luation system and increasing the budget through a World
Bank loan program. While he was the president of the
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Z. Metallkd. 96 (2005) 2
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology for
three years from 1995, he sought to enhance its education
and research levels and contributed to establishing the
Korea Institute of Advanced Study for theoretical physics
and mathematics and the Graduate School of Techno-Man-
agement. He also was the second president of the Korea
Powder Metallurgy Institute. But even after administrative
duties, he always returned to research and teaching. He
shared the view of most scientists that research was enjoy-
able and worthwhile even when the outcome was not suc-
cessful. He received the Hoam Prize in 1995 and the Out-
standing Scientist Award in 2004 in Korea. Forty-one
students received doctoral degrees under his supervision.
He likes classical music and literature. He did judo, rock
climbing, and ice hockey in his student days, and likes to
play tennis, ski, and swim in his later years. He loves his
charming wife and three daughters, who are happily mar-
ried and active professionally. Although he left North Korea
when he was a child, he hopes to return there someday to
help the people and in particular the scientists.
Suk-Joong L. Kang and Sung Bo Lee
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