Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
Prior to beginning her role at UCLA September 1, 2023, Park was a faculty member for 16 years at Columbia University in New York, where she served as the Lenfest Earth Institute Professor of Climate Change and the director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. She was also the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and an executive committee member of The Earth Institute and Columbia Climate School.
Park’s research focuses on sustainable energy and materials conversion pathways with an emphasis on using integrated carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies to address climate change. She has co-founded GreenOre CleanTech, a startup spun out of her research at Columbia University that transforms the hard-to-decarbonize industrial sector’s solid wastes and carbon emissions into value-added products, such as carbon-negative building materials, while recovering energy-relevant critical minerals.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Park received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical and biological engineering from the University of British Columbia in Canada. She also earned a doctorate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Ohio State University.