Who we are

GHDP Member Introduction

Young Su Park, an anthropologist and medical doctor, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin.  As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Park undertook ethnographic fieldworks on historical memory and violence of East Asian modernities and South Korean global health projects in Ethiopia.

His research seeks to explain how global health projects are shaped by ideas and experiences related to time such as modernization, national development, historical memories, religion, family cycles, and daily lives, contributing to critical understanding of global health from the lens of time.  His past works involves researches on healthcare system for undocumented migrants, cultural adjustment of North Korean refugee doctors, North Korean psychiatry, and illness experiences of Korean Chinese migrant workers in South Korea.

He has spent his early career as a health policy researcher in charge of public healthcare system for undocumented migrants, refugees and homeless people as well as healthcare management of rural public hospitals.  With a group of doctors and activists, he participated in the foundation of a local healthcare NGO in South Korea, Beautiful Life, that aimed to reduce social exclusion and health inequalities and provided visit care for the socially isolated elderly.  He received his M.D. in 2008 and M.A. (Anthropology) in 2012 from Seoul National University and PhD in Anthropology in 2018 from Stanford University.