Korea's Leader Research Program is the National Research Foundation's most selective individual grant line, designed to give the country's strongest laboratories the sustained funding that genuinely exploratory work requires. In June 2026 Yonsei's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering announced that Professor Jong-Hyun Ahn's group had been selected for the 2026 programme in its Type A category, to pursue high-performance three-dimensional integrated devices built from two-dimensional semiconductors.
The research question is one of the defining problems of post-silicon electronics. As conventional transistor scaling approaches physical limits, stacking devices vertically offers a route to continued gains in density and performance, but silicon's processing temperatures and bulk properties make true monolithic stacking difficult. Atomically thin semiconductors such as transition metal dichalcogenides can be grown or transferred at lower temperatures and retain strong electrical behaviour at nanometre thicknesses, making them natural candidates for the upper tiers of 3D chips.
Ahn is among the most cited researchers worldwide in flexible and two-dimensional electronics, and the leader grant consolidates Yonsei's position in a field where Korean industry has an acute strategic interest. With the country's memory and foundry sectors hunting for technologies beyond conventional scaling, long-horizon university programmes of this kind are where the candidate approaches get their first serious stress-testing.