YK Yoon, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, or ECE, has been given the inaugural R.C. Gonzalez Faculty Fellowship.
Established through a gift by University of Florida alumnus Rafael C. Gonzalez, Ph.D., the award recognizes engineering faculty excellence in research, innovation and leadership in engineering education. Yoon is known for his work in advanced semiconductor technology.
“I’m very honored to be appointed as the inaugural R.C. Gonzalez Faculty Fellow,” he said.
A highly respected educator and researcher with many accomplishments, Yoon holds four patents (with more pending) and is widely known for developing metaconductors, which turn complex, potentially chaotic network signals into adaptable systems.
His research and work with semiconductor interconnectivity ultimately boils down to making everyday electronics — smartphones, computers — more energy efficient. That means longer battery life, cooler materials and better computer performance for things such as, say, computer vision systems reading the license plates on moving vehicles and AI data centers.
Yoon’s research is a good fit for the R.C. Gonzalez Faculty Fellowship.
“Dr. Gonzalez’s area is image processing. My research may help to enhance that direction, especially semiconductor packaging that could do many things to enhance computer performance, chiplet performance,” Yoon said. “My focus is on interconnect.”
Now an emeritus professor at the University of Tennessee, Gonzalez earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UF. He joined UT as an associate professor in 1970 and served as ECE’s chair for three years ending in 1997.
He founded UT’s Image & Pattern Analysis Laboratory and the Robotics & Computer Vision Laboratory. In 1982, he founded Perceptics Corp. and served as its president until 1992. Under his direction, Perceptics became highly successful in image processing, laser disk storage and computer vision technologies. One successful Perceptics product was the world’s first commercially available computer vision system for reading the license plates on moving vehicles.
“We established this fellowship under the Gonzalez Family Endowment in the ECE department to recognize excellence in research with applications to imaging technologies,” Gonzalez said. “Dr. Yoon exemplifies the type of researcher whose work the fellowship aims to recognize and reward.”
In his letter to Yoon announcing the award, Mark Tehranipoor, Ph.D., dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and recent ECE department chair, noted: “Your dedication to excellence in research, teaching and mentoring is deeply appreciated and well deserving of this recognition.”
Yoon earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Seoul National University. He also earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In 2006, he joined the faculty of the University at Buffalo, where he worked before coming to UF in 2010. He received the NSF Early Career Development Award (CAREER) in 2008 and the Young Investigator Award in 2009. He has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of IEEE society.
Yoon also is the president of the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association.