Join us

Welcome!

We are a new lab, and we are building it from the ground up. That means the students who join now will shape what this lab becomes — and will work directly with the PI, not through layers of postdocs.

What we work on

Our research sits at the intersection of high-speed aerodynamics and combustion. Depending on your interests, you may work on:

• Intake design. Developing inverse design methods (VBSS and its extensions) for hypersonic intakes. Heavy on geometry, gas dynamics, and MATLAB/Python.

• Compressible CFD. Simulating intake and combustor flows with OpenFOAM and STAR-CCM+ on our in-house 320-core cluster. Some students go further and write their own solvers.

• Combustion and numerics. Chemical kinetics, stiff integration, and acceleration methods for reacting-flow simulations.

If you have never done any of this, that is fine. Most people haven't when they start.

Who we are looking for

• A solid grasp of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and gas dynamics — or the willingness to build it quickly.

• Comfort with writing code. You do not need to be a programmer, but you should not be afraid of a terminal.

• Above all: the habit of asking why a result looks the way it does, rather than accepting the number the solver printed.

Below are relevant undergraduate courses.

Essential

• MEC204 프로그래밍 응용 Programming Applications

• MEC220 열역학 Thermodynamics

• MEC230 유체역학 Fluid Mechanics

• MEC274 압축성유체역학 Compressible Flow

Strongly Recommended

• MEC221 응용열역학 Advanced Thermodynamics

• MEC273 공기역학 Aerodynamics

• MEC302 수치해석 Numerical Analysis

• MEC321 열전달 Heat Transfer

• MEC330 응용유체역학 Applied Fluid Mechanics

• MEC331 전산열유체공학 Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer

Advanced Topics

• MEC371 공기흡입추진 Air-breathing Propulsion

• MEC471 로켓추진 Rocket Propulsion

These are recommendations, not prerequisites — we care more about whether you can pick things up than what you have already taken. 

Positions

Graduate students (MS / PhD).
We are recruiting for 2027 admission. Funding will be available through several research grants.

Undergraduate researchers.
We take a small number of undergraduates each semester, including capstone projects. This is the most common route into the lab, and we encourage you to come early — a semester of work before you graduate tells both of us a great deal.

International applicants.
Applications are welcome. Research is conducted in English when needed, though Korean is helpful for daily life. Please check the [KHU graduate admissions page] for eligibility and deadlines before writing.

How to reach us

Feel free to contact me via my email krkang@khu.ac.kr with:

• A short paragraph on what interests you and why — specific is better than enthusiastic.

• Your CV.

• Your transcript (unofficial is fine).

We read every email. If you have looked at one of our papers and have a question about it, say so — that is the best possible opening.