Pohang University of Science & Technology

Location: South Korea The Pohang University of Science And Technology, shortened to POSTECH, slips one place in the Asia ranking this year, but remains within the top 10. A private research institution located in Pohang, POSTECH is 86th in the latest world rankings, and is also featured in the QS Top 50 Under 50, having been established in 1986 by steel company POSCO. Relatively small compared to the other top universities in Asia, POSTECH has a current student enrollment of 2,100 postgraduates and 1,300 undergraduates.

POSTECH was established in 1986 in Pohang, Korea by POSCO, one of the world's leading steel companies, for the purpose of providing advanced education for budding engineers and laying the groundwork for future technological development.[2] The founder of POSCO and the founding chairman of POSTECH, Park Tae-joon realized the need for Korea to educate their youth in science and technology to ensure Korea's position in the high technology arena. Park wanted to use the California Institute of Technology as a model for POSTECH and visited the university on a business trip to Los Angeles in 1985. He noted characteristics of CALTECH and requested to the POSTECH founding team to establish a contemporary research university that had: a low student-faculty ratio, a greater proportion of graduate students to undergraduates, a low net education cost, student on-campus housing, and a high-quality campus environment. These features represented a drastic departure from the Korean universities of the 1980s.[2] POSCO organized a task force on February 21, 1984 made up of POSCO employees selected by the company. Construction work began on August 17, 1985. On May 4, 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited POSTECH and donated an Inmos transputer, one of the leading edge computer parts at the time. The first matriculation ceremony was held on March 5, 1987. A group of 249 freshman were selected from the top one percent of all graduating seniors in Korea to be taught by an international faculty recruited by POSTECH founding president Hogil Kim and POSTECH task force head manager Dai Kong Lee. The first degree awarding ceremony was on February 20, 1991. Diplomas were awarded to 146 graduating seniors, 123 (84%) of whom went on to pursue graduate studies. The remaining 23 graduates were employed by the nation's major corporations including POSCO, Samsung, LG, and Hyundai.[3] To facilitate translational research and active academia-industry collaboration, POSTECH hosted POSCO's Research Institute of Science and Technology (RIST) on campus. In 1994, POSTECH set up the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL), a 3rd-generation synchrotron light source and now a national facility. Currently, the 4th-generation light source X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) is under construction (to be completed in 2015) at the cost of US$400 million, which will be the third one in the world and will open up new frontiers and research areas in life sciences, materials, chemistry, and physics.