SNU Prof. Ho-Young Kim’s Team Wins APS Gallery of Soft Matter Award
- Visualization of wrinkle patterns formed by swelling seed rafts on water surfaces
- Award-winning poster invited for presentation at APS Annual Meeting


▲ (From left) Juyeong Hong, Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University; Minjun Kim, M.S. student; Sungjune Park, Ph.D. candidate; Prof. Ho-Young Kim

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Prof. Ho-Young Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (Ho-Young Kim, Juyeong Hong, Minjun Kim, and Sungjune Park) has won the “Gallery of Soft Matter” Award, organized by the American Physical Society (APS), in March.

The Gallery of Soft Matter, hosted by the APS Division of Soft Matter, is an image and video competition designed to visually capture the aesthetic beauty and intriguing physical phenomena of soft matter systems, making them accessible and engaging not only for researchers but also for the general public.

Unlike conventional academic posters, submissions to the competition place greater emphasis on public appeal and clarity of communication, and are evaluated based on both visual excellence and scientific interest. Award-winning works are recognized for their excellence and published in the international journal Physical Review E. In the past, winning entries have been promoted by leading institutions in the United States and Europe, including Stanford University, Brown University, and ETH Zürich. In addition, award recipients are invited to deliver an invited talk at the APS Annual Meeting in the following year.

The award-winning work by Prof. Kim’s team artistically captures the phenomenon in which a raft of seeds covering the surface of water absorbs water, expands, and forms wrinkle patterns. The team discovered and visualized how a raft composed of swelling particles, such as basil seeds, bends and wrinkles as it expands while being confined within boundaries. This phenomenon follows the same physical principles as the formation of wrinkles in the brain and the buckling of an empty aluminum can under compression.

While previous studies have primarily focused on wrinkling and buckling in solid thin films, this award-winning work is recognized for its originality in identifying similar wrinkle patterns in a new system consisting of particle rafts and liquid interfaces. Furthermore, it serves as an important model system for intuitively visualizing instabilities that arise when various layers grow on liquid or soft matter interfaces.

Prof. Ho-Young Kim commented, “This achievement demonstrates not only the scientific depth of soft matter research, but also its visual appeal and potential for public engagement. We expect this work to contribute to understanding the physical principles of brain development as well as the growth of bacterial films in moist environments.”

The research team is currently conducting studies to precisely elucidate self-organization mechanisms in particulate soft interfaces and plans to present this work at the upcoming APS Annual Meeting next year.

▲ Award-winning entry by Prof. Ho-Young Kim’s research team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University, presented at the APS Gallery of Soft Matter Competition held in March 2026

[Reference Materials]
Official announcement page for the 2026 APS Gallery of Soft Matter award winners: https://engage.aps.org/dsoft/gallery/gallery/mm26-gallery

[Contact Information]
Professor Ho-Young Kim, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University / hyk@snu.ac.kr