Abstract

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Dr. Bong Chul Chung as one of core members of the Study Group of Mass Spectrometry and the founder and third president (2008-2009) of the Korea Society for Mass Spectrometry (KSMS). Dr. Chung received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1985. He was one of core members of the Doping Control Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and contributed to the successful Seoul Asian Games in 1986 and Seoul Olympic Games in 1988. In 1992, during his post-doctoral training in Prof. Cedric Shackleton’s Lab at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CA, USA), Dr. Chung published a distinguished article describing “the synthesis of deuterium-labeled intact steroid glucuronides,” which was the pioneering report on the availability of isotope-labeled internal standards for steroid analysis. Since returning to the KIST, he has been a prominent member of many organizations and societies, and he shared his expertise with his colleagues and mentees. Dr. Chung’s broad research interests involve the development of chromatography–mass-spectrometry-based assays of steroid hormones and their biomedical applications. He has been the principal investigator or a co-investigator in research studies that applied metabolomic platforms, published 210 peer-reviewed articles, and contributed to the development of 118 patents. The first article in this special issue is Dr. Chung’s minireview on hair metabolomics for biomarker discovery. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Bong Chul Chung for his passion for research and dedication to the KSMS and look forward to continuing to collaborate with him.