SDF

YOU Myoungsoon majored in public health and currently teaches in the Graduate School of Public Health at Seoul National University. Despite having completed her master’s and PhD in public health in Korea, she decided to pursue further studies abroad, going on to earn a second PhD at UC Berkeley conducting research on organizations as well as environmental and health risks and threats. Since returning to Korea, she has continued to conduct research on public healthcare organizations, health-related communications, and the major issues that affect them.

Myoungsoon has always regarded the greatest strengths of the public health field as the potential for “convergence” and “consilience,” She has long emphasized prevention and management of illness at a societal level above treatment of diseases that have already manifested, and likewise, the need for communication and governance among diverse groups and social actors above treatments or prescriptions catered to individual patients. Such convictions have inspired her involvement in the “Embitterment in Korean Society” project since 2018, which she began in collaboration with scholars in the humanities.

While the emergence of the novel coronavirus may have caused a public health crisis, the compounding of issues caused by the transmission of the virus have resulted in a comprehensive social crisis. Myoungsoon firmly believes that public health, especially now, must expand beyond existing boundaries or categories. What is most urgently and vitally needed is an approach to the current crisis not as the outcome of relationships between the virus and its hosts but that of humans as social actors relating and connecting in larger social networks that have enabled the transmission of the virus.