WNCG Postdoctoral Fellow Junil Choi recently began a position as Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea.
Prior to joining WNCG as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Prof. Choi received a BS and MS in electrical engineering from Seoul National University and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue. He worked with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Samsung Electronics in Korea, where he contributed to advanced codebook and feedback framework designs for the 3GPP LTE, LTE Advanced and IEEE 802.16m standards.
“My parents have both been in academia for decades,” Prof. Choi states. “Since I was young I have dreamed of working in academia. Although POSTECH is quite small, with a student to faculty ratio of about 6:3, it is one of the top three engineering schools in Korea.”
At WNCG, Prof. Choi’s research interests included the design and analysis of Massive MIMO, millimeter wave communication systems, distributed reception and vehicular communication systems, all of which he plans to continue in his work at POSTECH.
“Thanks to my experience at Purdue and WNCG, I am quite familiar with research, writing papers, and advising students,” Prof. Choi states. “I learned a lot from my WNCG advisor, Prof. Robert Heath. His passion and perfection trained me to become a better researcher, and working with his lab members prepared me to become an Assistant Professor.”
Over the course of his career, Prof. Choi has received the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the 2013 GLOBECOM Signal Processing for Communications Symposium Best Paper Award and the 2008 Global Samsung Technical Conference Best Paper Award. In 2011, he received the Katherine Birck Fellowship from Purdue and the Korean Government Scholarship Program for Study Overseas. In 2013, he received the Purdue University Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Student Association Outstanding Graduate Student Award and in 2014, he received the Purdue College of Engineering Outstanding Student Research Award.
When asked what advice he could offer to future researchers and faculty hopefuls, Prof. Choi stated, “Do not pursue the things that are most popular today, those areas will be saturated when you enter the job market. Pursue what you really like, that is what will keep you motivated.”