KIST’s Dr. Choi Ji-Hyun Selected for Prestigious HFSP Award

KIST (President: Sang-Rok Oh) is proud to announce that Dr. Ji Hyun Choi, Principal Researcher at KIST’s Center for Brain Disorders, has been selected for the 2025 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP).

In a fiercely competitive process involving 807 candidate teams with 2,208 researchers, Dr. Choi’s team emerged as one of only 30 teams (comprising 92 researchers) to receive this distinguished grant. Under the Research Grants Track, Dr. Choi and her collaborators will receive funding of USD 400,000 annually over the next three years, totaling USD 1.2 million. 

Dr. Choi plans to form an international collaborative research team together with Dr. Ahmed El Hady from Max Planck Institute, Germany and Professor Robert Froemke from New York University, USA to study “the neural and metabolic mechanisms behind group foraging behavior.” This groundbreaking research aims to explore how groups of rats collaborate to develop survival strategies in real-world environments by investigating the intricate connections between the brain and neural circuits, hormones and metabolic states, and social interactions.

A key aspect of the team’s work is the innovative use of KIST’s proprietary Clustered Wireless EEG Measurement System (CBRAIN) to integrate and record behavioral, physiological, and neural activity. Additionally, the project will combine New York University’s 24-hour behavioral monitoring system with a predictive mathematical model developed at the Max Planck Institute to quantitatively decipher the brain–physiology–social mechanisms that underpin cooperative behavior for survival.

The Human Frontier Science Program is a renowned international funding initiative that supports pioneering, interdisciplinary collaborative research aimed at unraveling complex biological mechanisms. Since its inception in 1989, HFSP has supported over 8,500 researchers from 73 countries, with 31 awardees later receiving Nobel Prizes – earning it the nickname “the Nobel Prize Fund.” 

For the 2025 cycle, a total of five Korean researchers, including Dr. Choi, Professors Woo-Jung Shin and Young-Gyu Yoon from KAIST, Dr. Nuri Choi from the University of Konstanz in Germany, and Dr. Yu-Ri Hong from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, have been selected as awardees. 

About the honor, KIST President Sang-Rok Oh stated, “KIST congratulates Dr. Choi for her selection as a recipient of the prestigious HFSP Award in recognition of her outstanding research innovation. KIST will continue to actively support researchers in undertaking bold, challenging projects that drive scientific achievement.”