The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois International named chemistry alumnus Taeghwan Hyeon (Seoul National University), Sharifa Sultana (Illinois), Colby Silvert (University of Maryland), Illinois graduate student Mehrdad Mohammadi, and Illinois undergraduate student David Mock as the recipients of the 2025 International Achievement Awards.
These awards recognize outstanding alumni, faculty, and students whose exceptional work, service, and/or scholarship made significant, global impact.
The recipients will be honored at a private awards ceremony on April 24.
Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement
Taeghwan Hyeon (PhD, '96), director of the Center for Nanoparticle Research in the Institute for Basic Science at Seoul National University (SNU), received the Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement.
Established in 2000 with a generous gift from longtime Illinois donors Jagdish and Madhuri Sheth, this award recognizes international alumni who are highly distinguished in their profession, have made outstanding contributions to government, humanity, science, art, or human welfare, and exemplify the strength of their education at Illinois.
Hyeon is a trailblazer in the field of nanoscience, notably in the synthesis, assembly, and biomedical applications of uniformly sized nanoparticles.
“He is perhaps most famous for his generalized, but simple, synthetic method of making extremely uniform nanometer-sized particles through the so-called ‘heat-up process,’” said Kenneth S. Suslick, the Marvin T. Schmidt Research Professor of Chemistry at Illinois and Hyeon’s nominator and PhD advisor. “He is truly one of the founding fathers of inorganic nanomaterials research.”
Hyeon is a distinguished professor in the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at SNU, the university’s highest professional position; a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology; and became a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the U.S.
To date, he has published more than 450 papers in prominent international journals served as the first associate editor of the world’s leading chemistry publication, the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 2010 to 2020, and now serves as the associate editor of ACS Nano, one of the leading journals in nanoscience.
In 2011, he was selected as one of the “Top 100 Chemists” of the decade by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and for the last five years he was chosen as “Highly Cited Researcher” in chemistry and materials science areas by Clarivate Analytics from 2014 to 2024.
He was chosen as one of the 2020 Clarivate Citation Laureates whose contributions are known to be on par with Nobel Prize recipients.
Hyeon was born in Dalseong County, Daegu, South Korea. He earned his B.A. in 1987 from SNU, his M.S. in 1989 from SNU, and his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Illinois in 1996.