Hye-Yeong Chun is a full professor at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences of Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, where she has been working as a professor for 23 years since March 1996. Hye-Yeong was born in November 1962 in Kangneung, Korea and raised under especially academic environment. After finishing her high school in Chuncheon, she went to Seoul in 1981 to study at Yonsei University where she got a BS and MS in Meteorology in 1985 and 1987, respectively. In August 1987, Hye-Yeong went to USA to study further, and received a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC in May 1991. The research topic of her Ph.D. thesis was “Role of a critical level in a shear flow with diabatic forcing”, which was done using both analytical solution and two-dimensional mesoscale numerical model including cloud microphysical processes that was developed by herself. From November 1991 to January 1993 before she returned back to Korea, Hye-Yeong has worked at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)/NASA as a postdoctoral fellow on the problem of atmospheric solitary waves.
The major role for Hye-Yeong in Yonsei University is to teach courses, mainly atmospheric dynamics, for undergraduate and graduate students and to do scientific research. The research interests of her include atmospheric gravity waves (GWs), parameterization of convective GWs for use in global weather forecasting and climate models, wave dynamics including planetary and GW interactions, large-scale circulations in the middle atmosphere including quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) and stratospheric sudden warming (SSW), and aviation turbulence including analysis of observational data and development of operational forecasting system. She is a pioneer to develop a convective GW parameterization in 1998 and continuously updated until recently, which has been contributed to several global weather forecasting and climate models. Hye-Yeong published about 130 peer-reviewed journal papers including 90 SCI(E) papers in major journals in atmospheric dynamics. She has advised about 10 Ph.D. students and 20 MS students. In addition to teaching and research, she has taken several executive positions in Yonsei University, such as Department Chair and Dean of the University College, as well as research team leader positions of several national education and research programs. Also, Hye-Yeong has served as a vice president of Korean Meteorological Society (KMS) and committee of academic board of KMS. She has been a Fellow of Korean Academy of Science and Technology since 2010.
Hye-Yeong would like to concentrate in the research of atmospheric wave dynamics, especially, in the generation of planetary waves by GWs, of which she believes to be an important subject to advance our understanding in atmospheric dynamics in the middle atmosphere, including some interesting phenomena such as SSW and Brewer-Dobson circulation (BDC).