Professor Thomas Kang of SNU College of Engineering Receives ASCE’s Prestigious T.Y. Lin Award in the Field of Structural Engineering 
- Professor Kang’s research team wins the 2025 T.Y. Lin Award 
- Top paper award jointly selected by three leading international societies in prestressed concrete structures


▲ (From left) Professor Thomas Kang, Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, SNU College of Engineering; Logo of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced on March 28th that a research team led by Professor Thomas Kang from the Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering has won the 2025 T.Y. Lin Award, one of the most prestigious paper awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the world’s leading academic society in the field of civil engineering.

Co-recipients of the award include Professor Kang’s former students, Professor Sanghee Kim (Kyonggi University, Department of Architectural Engineering), Dong Joo Lee (Hanssem Co., Ltd.), Byung Un Kwon (CNP Dongyang Co., Ltd.), and Professor Donghyuk Jung (Korea University, School of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering), who was a postdoctoral researcher under Professor Kang.

ASCE, with a 173-year history, is the most prestigious academic society in the field of civil engineering. The T.Y. Lin Award is jointly presented by ASCE, the American Concrete Institute (ACI), and the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) to recognize the most outstanding paper in the field of prestressed concrete structures for the year.

Professor Kang’s research team was selected for the 2025 T.Y. Lin Award with their paper, "Seismic Behavior of Monolithic Exterior Beam-Column Connections with Unbonded Post-Tensioning." The awards ceremony will take place at the ASCE Structures Congress in Boston, USA, next year.

Professor Thomas Kang, the principal investigator, has achieved an extraordinary feat by consecutively winning the 2009 ACI Wason Medal for Most Meritorious Paper, the 2023 PCI Martin P. Korn Award, and the 2025 ASCE T.Y. Lin Award. In addition, he received the Kenneth B. Bondy Award for the Most Meritorious Technical Paper from the Post-Tensioning Institute (PTI) twice, in 2013 and 2023, solidifying his reputation as a world-leading scholar in post-tensioned concrete structures. With this achievement, Professor Kang has become the only scholar in the world to have received the top paper award from all four major international societies in this field.

A Fellow of ACI and PTI, as well as a Member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology and the National Academy of Engineering of Korea, Professor Kang stated,
"I will continue to strive to be a scholar who makes my predecessors and future generations proud."


[Contact Information]
Postdoctoral Researcher Hyeongyeop Shin, SNU College of Engineering, Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering / sinsin1993@snu.ac.kr / +82-2-880-8303