Team

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  Suk Whan Chang has more than 30 years of experience in investment banking, venture capital, and private equity investments. He has managed funds totaling $250 million, investing in tech start-ups and SMEs in Korea with critical Intellectual Properties(IP), including 70 Korean movies. In addition, he helped develop financing techniques to help companies monetize their Ip as a part of the funding. He is keen to introduce promising Korean companies to global partners for further commercialization.

  He currently serves as the Chairman of Asan Nanum Foundation, a $500 million non-profit organization promoting entrepreneurship through various educational programs and incubating for start-ups.

  Earlier in his career, he developed experience in international finance, holding senior positions in Asia, Europe, and the US, working for Yamaichi International(America), Inc., Tong Yang Securities(America), Inc., SBC Warburg Securities, Seoul, and Daishin International(Europe). In addition, during the Asian financial crisis period, he was a co-founder and a Managing Partner of Soros Consultants, Inc., exclusively advising Soros Fund Management on direct investment into Korea.

  He served in the Korean Army as an artillery officer and an instructor at the Military Academy. He has a BS in Architectural Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management, MIT. For the past 17 years, he has served as the Regional Chair for MIT Educational Counselors in Korea, interviewing applicants to MIT.

  Doyeol (David) Ahn has more than 35 years of experience in semiconductor physics, optoelectronic devices, and quantum information science. His works on the non-Markovian coherence model of qubit state evolution published in Physical Review A in 2000 and relativistic entanglement published in Physical Review A in 2003 are considered as the classic papers in quantum information science. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in relativistic quantum information science in the arena of both special and general relativistic aspects of quantum information. In 1998, he was endowed with a multi-million-dollar project for nine years on quantum computation from the Korean government. He almost single-handedly initiated quantum information science research in Korea. 

   In 2005, he was elected to the IEEE Fellow for his contribution in the theory of semiconductor quantum-well lasers and the development of quantum information communication research. In 2009, he also became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2016, he received an ECE Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2021, he is elected to the member of the National Academy of Engineering, Korea. In 2020, he was selected as one of the finalists for “Million Dollar International Quantum U Tech Accelerator,” sponsored by the US Air Force out of more than 250 proposals submitted worldwide for his quantum circuit optimization protocol called quantum Karnaugh map and later awarded US Air Force (AFOSR) grants in quantum computing algorithms for optimization and computational fluid dynamics.

  Currently, he is a WB Distinguished Professor of Quantum Electronics at the University of Seoul. Earlier in his career, he was holding various positions at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, POSTECH, and LG Central Research Center.

  He holds 45 US patents, published a textbook entitled, “Engineering Quantum Mechanics,” from Wiley, 2011, with three book chapters and coauthored more than 250 refereed journal and conference papers, and received more than dozen research grants from the Korean governments and industries.

  He obtained a Ph. D in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, and an M. S and B. S. from Seoul National University in 1985 and 1983, respectively.

  Sang-Yun Lee has experience in data science, deep-learning, and signal processing. In his career, he built various types of deep-learning models such as time-series prediction for geomagnetic indices, Chinese character recognition for ancient Korean documents, and image generation for oriental painting, etc. Also, he developed a data pipeline and signal processing software for the Doppler radar wind profiler.

  He is fascinated with the disruptive potential of Quantum Computing, so he wants to bring it to the real world. Therefore he is currently focusing on Quantum Machine Learning and Optimization problems. 

  He has a dual bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy from Seoul National University and acquired a master’s degree in Astronomy from Seoul National University in 2017.

  Hansol Noh has worked on the analysis and the numerical computation of the propagation of photon state and geometric phase in curved space time which was published in npj Quantum Information in 2021, acoustic meta surface mimicking rotating black showing gain over 100% for acoustic wave with orbital angular momentum and various meta surface designs for high permittivity over 100. At First Quantum, he is investigating the quantum computing applications to the computational fluid dynamics problems.

  He is expected to obtain his Ph. D in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University in 2023. He obtained M. S. and B. S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Seoul in 2017 and 2015, respectively. 

  Byeongyong Park is a graduate student at the University of Seoul. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering under Professor David Ahn. He has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Seoul.

  His research area is quantum circuit optimization, and his recent work was for reducing the circuit cost of quantum Fourier transform. Currently, he wants to put his focus on quantum algorithms themselves. Especially, he is interested in quantum simulation and quantum machine learning.