Ye jin Kang is the Founding Director of Global Humanitarian Engagement, Inc, a volunteer-based organization founded in 2012 that has addressed the public gap in understanding of bringing humanitarian aid to the DPRK. It has engaged hundreds of young scholars and professionals in over twenty different countries through an educational apparatus that includes conferences, courses, workshops, and policy briefs.
With interdisciplinary training as a physician scientist and in public policy, her aim is to advance and integrate DPRK’s health professionals into the greater medical community, and work together towards better solutions for infectious disease control and prevention. From mid-2014 to early-2015, she served as the first Program Director in the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology Division of Medical Sciences. Because she has family roots in the DPRK, much of her health work has been spent studying tuberculosis due to its prevalence there. She has performed field research in Jilin, the Chinese province that borders DPRK, to investigate capacity building programs on TB for health workers from the DPRK. She is currently an Assistant Instructor at UT Southwestern, researching the role of antibodies in protection against tuberculosis (TB) and COVID with grant support from a Burroughs Wellcome Physician-Scientist Institutional Award. She was also an undergraduate fellow in the Presidential Fellowship program run by the Center for the Presidency and Congress, where her research focused on improving the U.S. response to the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic and other diseases.
She graduated from Rice University with a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and BA in Policy Studies (Global Health). Ye jin taught a course at Rice called ‘Demystifying DPRK’ under the academic supervision of former Rice President Malcolm Gillis. Through the Rhodes Scholarship, she read for a MSc in Medical Anthropology and MPP at the University of Oxford. She is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and pursued residency training at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.