KAIST said on the 13th it held a completion ceremony for the "Lotte x KAIST R&D Center" at its main Daejeon campus on the 11th, attended by Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin, Lotte Group officials, key university administrators, and faculty and staff of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The center is set to become an industry-academia hub to address sustainability challenges facing humanity, including climate change and carbon neutrality.
The "Lotte x KAIST R&D Center" was built with a 10 billion won building donation from Lotte Group and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering's own funds at KAIST. It will operate as an industry-academia research hub that spans the full research and development process, from basic and fundamental research on future technologies to experiments, prototype production, and technology commercialization. KAIST said it is meaningful in that it presents a new model of "ultra-boundary collaboration" by consolidating the university's research capabilities and corporations' industrial and commercialization experience in a single space, going beyond the limits of existing industry-academia cooperation. The plan is to create a cooperation system that not only exchanges research outcomes between the university and corporations, but also jointly identifies and studies future problems, linking the results to industry and commercialization.
The center has one underground floor and six above ground, with a total floor area of about 4,298 square meters (about 1,300 pyeong). Open research spaces and collaboration areas are organically arranged so researchers can freely interact and conduct joint research across disciplinary and organizational boundaries.
The center will conduct research in three major areas with the goal of realizing a sustainable future society. The first is "bio-sustainability." Based on systems metabolic engineering, it studies sustainable bio technologies that can replace existing fossil resources, such as biofuels and bioplastics. The second is "carbon-neutral energy, materials and processes." It promotes the development of core technologies in energy, materials and processes needed to achieve a carbon-neutral society, including green hydrogen, renewable energy and batteries. The third is "advanced food and healthcare." It explores advanced technologies in future food and healthcare to seek new technological solutions for a healthy and sustainable future society.
The center will also use artificial intelligence (AI) across research to discover new materials and technologies and to increase the speed and efficiency of research and development. Through this, KAIST's "AI-native campus" strategy will be extended to actual research sites. The center includes a collaborative research space that Lotte and KAIST researchers can use jointly, as well as "Shin Dong-bin Hall" for communication and exchange among researchers. KAIST plans to expand an open industry-academia cooperation ecosystem centered on the center, where researchers and corporations work together from problem identification to research and development, demonstration and commercialization.
KAIST and Lotte have been cooperating for more than a decade. Since 2012, KAIST and Lotte have run commissioned master's and doctoral programs for Lotte employees and have expanded cooperation across research and education, including technology transfer and personnel exchange with Lotte Chemical. In 2022, they launched the "Lotte Chemical–KAIST Carbon Neutrality Research Center" to secure key technologies for achieving carbon neutrality and to cultivate specialized talent, kicking off joint research in the carbon neutrality field in earnest. The construction of the "Lotte x KAIST R&D Center" is the result of expanding the two institutions' decade-long accumulated cooperation and trust into research infrastructure that spans from joint research to future technology development and commercialization.
Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin, congratulating the completion of the R&D center, said, "I hope the R&D center will take root as a hub for industry-academia cooperation that creates greater possibilities beyond the boundaries of schools and corporations," and added, "Lotte will be a reliable partner so faculty and students can research and take on challenges freely without fearing failure."
KAIST President Bae Choong-sik said, "We are deeply grateful for Lotte's support and cooperation, which have long accompanied KAIST's talent development and research," and added, "Today's completion is not the end of a building but the beginning of new cooperation. By combining KAIST's research capabilities with Lotte's industrial and commercialization capabilities, we will connect ideas and technologies from the lab to real value on industrial sites and jointly create new growth engines for Korea and solutions for a sustainable future."