Eco-Disasters: What Happened and How to Prevent Them

Dr. Seok Soon Park is a professor emeritus in the department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea and currently active as a South Korean ambassador to the World Climate Intelligence Foundation headquartered in the Netherlands and a member of CO2 Coalition in the United States. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey) in 1983 and 1985, after graduating from Seoul National University with B.S in Zoology, in 1980. Since he returned to South Korea as an invited outstanding scientist sponsored by the Korea Science Foundation in March 1988, he has published over 150 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and written and translated more than 30 books on the environmental impact of poverty, environmental disasters, systems ecology, eco-hazard of electromagnetic fields, climate change, water quality management, and environmental laws, etc. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental Science at Rutgers University, a visiting professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, and the 17th President of the Korea National Institute of Environmental Research. He has also been involved in various roles such as the 11th President of the Korean Environmental Education Association, a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Education, Science and Technology, a member of the Presidential Green Growth Committee, and the Vice President of the Research Affairs at Ewha Womans University. During his undergraduate studies at Seoul National University, I received the Best Basic Science Award at a nationwide college student academic contest (1979). He has also received the Best Scientist and Engineer Award of the Month from Korea Research Foundation (2007) and Korea Presidential Award on Green Growth (2013). He was invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the 2009 International Society for Ecological Modelling Conference (Quebec, Canada) in recognition of the outstanding quality of his paper.