Joining Korea Science Academy of KAIST as Faculty

On August 1, I joined Korea Science Academy of KAIST (KSA) as full-time faculty in the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science.

The past year took me through two rather different worlds. From last summer, I spent roughly ten months as CTO at Divercity House, leading full-stack web and app development — work that picked up an award at the Asan Nanum Foundation’s Chung Ju-yung Startup Competition along the way. For the three months after that, I worked as a Forward-Deployed Engineer at Skelter Labs, embedded at a client site alongside a global consulting firm, shaping the service design and use cases for an AX project. In the early days there, I also contributed in a small way to building the Bella platform.

Solving real problems had its own pleasure. But what I want to do now is teach — to bring AI education to students.

Education feels like it is passing through a period of genuine confusion. Set an assignment and AI will finish it before the student has properly begun, which leaves the assignment measuring nothing at all. We are back to a harder question: what, exactly, is a degree meant to guarantee?

And yet two things survive, even when the machine writes the answer. Knowing which question to ask. And knowing whether the answer in front of you is right. The first belongs to someone who has sat with a problem long enough to feel its shape. The second belongs to someone who has traced the principle through by hand.

How to teach both is what I’ll be thinking about in Busan. It’s a question without a settled answer, and I expect a fair amount of trial and error. If you work in education, or find yourself circling the same question, I’d be glad to hear from you — please do reach out.

To everyone who taught me so much along the way: thank you. I’ll give this new role my best.