The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) has selected Park HoSeok, a professor of Chemical Engineering at SKKU as the winner of the Scientist of the month award. This award selects a researcher who has contributed to the development of science and technology with outstanding results and awards the MSIT Minister prize with 10 million won. Prof. Park revealed the energy storage mechanism of the two-dimensional semiconductor phosphorene and proved its potential as an energy storage device. Phosphorene is a two-dimensional material which is a sliced atom layer of black phosphorus, which is also known as a battery material. Phosphorene was difficult to be used as an energy storage material due to poor charge and discharge stability. Prof. Park’s research team, however, focused on phosphorene’s physical and chemical properties that show an oxidation-reduction reaction and developed high efficiency, high power, and high safety supercapacitors using this phosphorene. Supercapacitors are devices that store energy by physical or surface oxidation-reduction reaction. Rapid charge and discharge, high performance, and long life are its strengths, but it is difficult to use due to its low energy density. It is, however, expected that Prof. Park’s research will help to overcome the energy density limitation of supercapacitors. The study was published in the journal Nature Materials in February. “In the future, when Phosphorene’s energy density limit is overcome, it is expected to be used to develop new materials for high capacity energy storage and improve the performance of various electrochemical systems,” Prof. Park said.