Merck exec gets POSTECH honorary Ph.D.

Peter S. Kim, 53, president of Merck Research Laboratories, will become an honorary doctor of science at Pohang University of Science and Technology.

POSTECH said Wednesday that it would award an honorary doctoral degree in science to Kim during the graduation ceremony on Friday. He will be the third honorary doctorate of science at the university.

The second-generation Korean-American earned his B.A. at Cornell University in 1979 and Ph.D at Stanford University in 1985. He served as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research from 1992 to 2001. He served as a biology professor at MIT from 1988 to 2001.

He has published more than 25 articles in Nature, Science and other journals, and gained international recognition for his 1997 research on the AIDS virus mechanism.

POSTECH first conferred an honorary science Ph.D to the 2003 Nobel chemistry prize winner Roderick MacKinnon of The Rockefeller University in 2006 and an honorary engineering Ph.D to Bell Labs President Kim Jeong-hoon in 2010.

(swchun@heraldcorp.com)