Max Planck Research for International Networking

SPEED group from South Korea becomes Max Planck partner group

Max Planck Partner Groups are an instrument for the joint promotion of young scientists worldwide. The aim is to use them to promote international scientific networking. 

Prof. Dr. Hye Jin Park has made it and was selected for such a partner group at Inha University in Incheon, South Korea. After working for three and a half years as a PostDoc in the Department of Theoretical Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, where she applied approaches from theoretical physics to biological problems, Prof. Dr Park became group leader at the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics in Pohang, South Korea, in early 2020.

In 2021, she received a permanent position as professor of theoretical physics at Inha University. There, she leads the Statistical Physics of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics research group, or SPEED group for short.  With this group, she regularly organises workshops on modelling evolution and ecology. The group has now been officially launched at the most recent workshop. 

Prof. Park plans to use the funding to promote this field in Korea and to expand her existing connections to Germany, thus establishing a closer link between theoretical physics and biology.