[Profile] Park Sun-ae, Minister of Education Nominee... Expert in Administration and Policy

[Asia Economy Reporter Han Jinju] Park Soon-ae, the nominee for Minister of Education, is an administrative and policy expert who served as a member of the Political, Judicial, and Administrative Subcommittee of the Presidential Transition Committee. She holds records such as being the first female president of the Korean Association for Public Administration, the first female head of the Public Institution Evaluation Team at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the second Korean member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA).

Born in 1965, she graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in Public Administration and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in the United States. She subsequently worked as a senior researcher at the Yonsei University Institute of Social Sciences, an associate research fellow in the Urban Management Research Department at the Seoul Institute, and an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at Soongsil University. Since 2004, she has been a professor in the Department of Public Administration at Seoul National University.

She has served as the head of the Public Institution Management Evaluation Team at the Ministry of Economy and Finance and as an outside director at KB Kookmin Bank, and was the first female president in the 65-year history of the Korean Association for Public Administration. In July of last year, she was appointed as a member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA) for a four-year term. In addition to her academic activities with the Korean Association for Public Administration, the Korean Association for Local Government Studies, and the Korean Association for Local Autonomy, she has experience as head of the Public Institution Evaluation Team at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, as an internal evaluation committee member at the Ministry of Environment, and in numerous government advisory and public service roles including for the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Her major publications include The Future of Labor (editor, 2016), Asking the Future Government (editor, 2015), and Stories of Women Leaders Told to Dreaming Female College Students (2010).