Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park has been appointed the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, effective September 1.
One of the nation’s leading experts on carbon capture and conversion technology, Park is currently the Lenfest Earth Institute Professor of Climate Change and chair of the department of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University, where she has been a faculty member since 2007. She also is director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, an executive committee member of The Earth Institute and Columbia Climate School, and a member of Columbia’s Department of Chemical Engineering.
“Chancellor Block and I are confident that under Alissa’s visionary leadership, UCLA Samueli will make even greater strides in advancing engineering education and research for the benefit of our society,” said Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, in a written message to the campus.
At Columbia, Park created highly interdisciplinary research and educational programs in sustainable energy and decarbonization, including the CarbonTech Development Initiative for translational decarbonization research — a collaboration between the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy and the Center on Global Energy Policy. She also substantially improved the diversity of the faculty and student bodies within her units, spearheading efforts to achieve a cultural shift toward equity, inclusion and respect.
“I am deeply humbled and also excited to serve as the next dean of engineering at UCLA, a world-class public university,” Park said. “It is an exciting and critical time for engineering and computer science as we focus on addressing many grand challenges and opportunities with tremendous social impact such as climate change, pandemics and artificial intelligence.”
In addition to being active with Columbia’s Women in Energy Initiative, Park has also been involved in a collaboration with UN Women — a United Nations initiative — on a project supporting entrepreneurship in sustainable energy in developing countries.
“I am thrilled to work with all of the members of our exceptional and diverse community at UCLA Samueli — faculty, students, staff, alumni and other colleagues — to engineer change for a better future, by design, for all,” Park added.
Park’s research focuses on sustainable energy and materials conversion pathways with an emphasis on using integrated carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies to address climate change. Her research group also is investigating direct air capture of carbon dioxide and negative emission technologies, including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and sustainable construction materials with low carbon intensity.
In 2016, Park co-founded GreenOre CleanTech, a startup spun out of research developed at Columbia Engineering 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, and the daughter of an architectural engineer and an artist who loves chemistry, 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 Ohio State University, from which she later received a distinguished alumni award for academic excellence in 2021.
A fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), Park is also a fellow of the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is currently serving as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Carbon Utilization Infrastructure, Markets, Research and Development.
Among Park’s numerous awards and recognitions are an AIChE Particle Technology Forum (PTF) Shell Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems, a U.S. Clean Energy Education and Empowerment (C3E) Research Award, AIChE PTF’s PSRI Lectureship Award, Columbia University’s Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award, an American Chemical Society WCC Rising Star Award and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She is a member of numerous editorial and advisory boards, and has led a number of global and national discussions on CCUS technologies, including the 2019 National Petroleum Council CCUS Report and the 2017 Mission Innovation Workshop on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage.
Bruce Dunn, a materials science and engineering distinguished professor and UCLA Samueli’s former associate dean for research and physical resources, has served as the school’s interim dean since August 2022. Park will be the eighth — and second female — dean of UCLA Samueli, which was established in 1945. She will succeed Jayathi Murthy, who became the president of Oregon State University in September 2022.
The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering is a tightly knit community of nearly 200 full-time faculty members, more than 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as 40,000 active alumni. Known as the birthplace of the internet, UCLA Samueli is also where countless other fields took some of their first steps – from artificial intelligence to reverse osmosis, from mobile communications to human prosthetics. In 2021, UCLA became the first university to win an XPRIZE with a UCLA Samueli team awarded a $7.5 million grand prize in the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. UCLA Samueli is consistently ranked in the Top 10 among U.S. public engineering schools and its online master’s program is ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report.
