Jisoon Ihm is a South Korean physicist and Distinguished Professor in Department of Physics at Pohang University of Science and Technology in Pohang, South Korea.
His first paper published in 1979 spawned a new area in condensed matter physics, namely, “computational materials physics,” and the paper is nowadays regarded[by whom?] as classic in the field. He also published an invited review article on this subject as a single author in Reports on Progress in Physics in 1988. He has carried out research in the development of a novel computational formulation for calculating the total energy of solids based on quantum mechanics. An international society on this field of research was formed around 1990, and its 16th annual meeting was held in Trieste, Italy, in January 2013. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee for this series of meetings. A similar society was formed in Asia in 1998 and he has played a key role in its birth and continued growth.
In 1996, he was presented with the Korea Science Award, which included a commendation by the president of Korea, and two years later won the Scientist of the Year Award.
He was Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at SNU during the period 2006-2010. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2007, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA since 2011. He has been a Distinguished Professor at Seoul National University since 2009. He is now engaged in improving the formalism of computational materials physics and its applications to many different material systems such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, topological insulators, and energy storage materials. In 2023, he was awarded the Ho-Am Prize in Science in the field of physics and mathematics.