Our main goal is to promote the interest and career of Korean Physicists in America. As most of you are aware already, the annual award of OYRA (Outstanding Young Research Award) has become quite successful and is now nationally known. I am very happy to see that the quality of the applicants is very high. I hope that many of you with recent Ph.D.'s will apply for this award this coming fall. We need to look into further expanding this kind of program for recognizing and encouraging future generations of Korean physicists. Recently, I have been thinking if OYRA should be part of the APS award program.  It is an interesting question to be discussed among our members in the future. The advantage is a more formal, prestigious, and wider recognition but there are also obligations to meet and lack of total independence for us. If there is a prevailing consensus to join the APS program, I will be happy to work for it with APS. I would especially welcome the opinion from our young members including recent recipients.

An urgent task for AKPA is to upgrade and maintain the membership directory.  The present directory has been recently improved through dedicated efforts by several AKPA members including Dr. Jeong-Sun Moon of Hughes Research Laboratory (new e-Link chair). He has agreed to further improve and update the directory this year. We have also been helping to promote closer interactions among Korean physicists through traditional dinner meetings not only among ourselves but also with the participants from Korea at some APS (American Physical Society) meetings. One well established program is the cherished traditional annual dinner meeting at APS March Meeting. This meeting has been sustained over the past three decades through selfless efforts by volunteers like Drs. Yoon Soo Park (ONR), Sang Boo Nam (KAIST), Y. S. Kim (U. Maryland), and, especially, by Yung Kee Yeo (AFIT), and others. I have attended these meetings regularly more than two decades. AKPA can partially sponsor other dinner meetings wherever and whenever there is a need.

Many members feel that we should strengthen our ties with the Korean Physical Society (KPS). To this end, I have been communicating with Prof. Dong-Pil Min of SNU (VP, KPS) for a closer and mutually beneficial exchange of information between our two organizations. He provided us with a list of conferences/workshops to be held in Korea in the next few months. Currently, the announcement is in Korean language and it will take time for a more extensive list in English to be released later. I want to express my deep appreciation for his kind help and look forward to working with him. I am also planning to establish a closer contact between AKPA and individual physicists in Korea who have frequent contact with our community. We will add them in our distribution list as our colleagues (and as our own flesh and blood) and build up the list gradually. I will welcome any request from all of you (including our colleagues in Korea) to disseminate any useful public information through our vast AKPA network.

We will also start e-publishing the list of recent publications (within the past ~ two years) by our members including our colleagues in Korea
and job opening. Since we have a vast distribution network among Korean physicists in the U.S. and Korea, it will be a very valuable investment of time for you. We have to rely on you to provide us with the information. Please send me your list in the format of the Physical review with the title preceding the reference and the contact address following the reference to minimize the administrative cost [e.g., "Energy transfer of excitons between quantum wells separated by a wide barrier," S. K. Lyo, Phys. Rev. B 62, 13641 (2000). Contactsklyo@sandia.gov]. In this regard, we will also start listing new Ph. D.'s among our members. Please send me your info with a full name, university, thesis tittle/area, theor/exper, current address. Finally, I have noticed that AKPA Web site has not been available temporarily. Dr. Hoydoo You of Argonne Nat'l Lab (new Publicity and Editorial Secretary) has agreed to work on it and will improve its content in the near future. Further announcement will be made when it is available.

I will welcome any comments and truly appreciate your suggestions. AKPA officers and I will try our best to serve AKPA better.