As part of efforts to boost international competitiveness, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology offers more than half of its courses in English.
Seventeen percent of full-time teaching staff at the state-funded university are non-Koreans, most of whom are engineering experts or scientists.
James Morrison, a former advisory engineer at IBM in Vermont and assistant professor at Central Michigan University, joined KAIST early this year as an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering.

"KAIST offers a competitive start-up package, salary and benefits comparable to large state schools in the United States. The start of a tenure system is also similar to that of the United States," Morrison said in an email interview.

"As one of my areas of interest is semiconductor manufacturing automation or high-tech manufacturing, the fact that Samsung is based in Korea is also appealing."
Morrison chose KAIST also because he knew the students would be excellent. He described his students as "driven to succeed, well-prepared and smart."
"As my Korean is very poor, I am fortunate that most students and virtually all faculty have command of English to such a degree that communication is always possible," said the American, who has a Korean wife.

"I feel that KAIST has welcomed me. In some ways, I think that because I am a foreign faculty, others make special efforts to help me."
Morrison was happy to hear that the Korean government is planning to provide large grants for universities to hire academics from abroad.
He was involved in his department's proposal for the "World-class University" state funding to create a research group focusing on the design of next-generation semiconductor wafer/LCD fabrication plants.

"We identified several internationally famous world-class scholars in the United States who expressed a willingness to participate," he said.
"In addition, I played a minor role in reviewing another WCU proposal to create a new department at KAIST - the Department of Intelligent Service Engineering. I am concurrently appointed to that department."
The professor has clear goals for himself - to design and evaluate solutions for problems of substantial importance, publish the results, obtain grant money to support his work and serve his academic community.

"In particular, as electronics is a cornerstone industry in Korea, solving problems in semiconductor manufacturing automation can have significant value - increasing market share and improving efficiency," he said.

Morrison is a part of the KAIST Mobile Floating Port project which seeks to develop next-generation port service concepts with an eye toward extending Korea's strengths in this area.