The Physics Department mourns the loss of our friend and colleague, Professor Kyungwha Park.

Kyungwha was born on October 11, 1969, in Tongyeong, South Korea.  She spent her middle and high school years in Busan, South Korea.  She studied physics at Korea University, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1991 and then went on to receive an MS degree in Physis in 1993.  She went on to Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. in Physics in 2000. She followed that with postdoctoral positions at Florida State University and the Naval Research Laboratory.

Dr. Park joined the Virginia Tech Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2005, was tenured and appointed as Associate Professor in 2010, and promoted to Professor in 2019.  Her research area was theoretical condensed matter physics, and she was internationally well-regarded for her expertise in the electronic, magnetic, and transport properties of spin-orbit-coupled nanostructures and molecular magnets.  She had 98 peer-reviewed publications in her career, and the work of herself and her research group was funded by the Jeffress Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.  Five students received the Ph.D. degree under her guidance, and she worked on research with eight other graduate students and several undergraduate students.    She also advised seven postdoctoral fellows.  She was honored as the Korean-American Women in Science and Engineering Outstanding Woman Scientist in 2015 and received a Fulbright Fellowship, which she carried out at the Wigner Research Center for Physics in Budapest, Hungary, in the summer of 2023.  She taught many upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses.  She was particularly well known for guiding many of the Department’s cohorts of first-year graduate students through their core required course in electricity and magnetism.

Dr. Park was diagnosed with lung cancer in the Summer of 2022.  Despite her illness and several rounds of exhausting treatments, she maintained an active schedule that included travel, research resulting in numerous peer-reviewed publications, serving as the primary advisor to four graduate students pursuing their Ph.D. degrees, and actively participating on Physics Department committees.  Her last talk on her work was presented remotely as part of the EDISON 23 conference held at Virginia Tech in July 2025.  Over a brief time in Summer 2025, the disease became more aggressive and Dr. Park passed away on August 14, 2025. 

Kyungwha was a valued colleague in our department for two decades.  She was a quiet person whose excellent research work spoke for itself.  Her commitment to scientific rigor, honesty, and excellence was uwavering.  Upon her passing, we received many warm recollections of her from colleagues and students locally and around the world, including from several former advisees who emphasized the important role she had played in their successful careers.  We will all miss our wonderful friend and colleague who was taken from us too soon.