Distinguished guests, esteemed colleagues, and friends,

  It is my profound honor, as Program Chair, to welcome you to the 25th International Symposium on Eco-materials Processing and Design (ISEPD 2027), convened at Baekyang-nuri, Yonsei University, on 25–26 January 2027. To the scholars and colleagues who have travelled here from across the world to share this journey of inquiry, I extend my warmest and most sincere welcome.

  Since it first convened in Korea in 2000, ISEPD has met without interruption, moving across the nations of Asia and steadily broadening the interdisciplinary horizon of eco-materials. To reach our 25th edition in the very country where the journey began is a milestone of particular resonance—an occasion both to reflect upon a generation of scholarly achievement and to chart the coordinates of the quarter-century ahead.

  The transition toward carbon neutrality and a circular economy is no longer an aspiration but a concrete engineering imperative of our time. The design and processing of materials stand at the frontier of this transition, and the themes of this symposium—green processing, remediation and recycling, energy conversion and storage, environmental protection and surface technologies, bio-inspired materials, and AI for materials design—are precisely the pillars upon which that transformation rests.

  Genuine innovation is so often born at the boundaries between disciplines. It is my hope that the tradition of interdisciplinary dialogue ISEPD has long upheld will, within the welcoming halls of Baekyang-nuri, give rise to still deeper insight and collaboration. Beyond the sessions and discussions, may these two days in midwinter Seoul afford the rare pleasure of reuniting with longtime friends and meeting new companions in inquiry.

  Finally, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the organizing committee, the advisory members, and our sponsoring institutions, whose dedication has made this gathering possible. The participation of each of you is what will render ISEPD 2027 intellectually rich and long remembered.

Once again, welcome.