Buhm Soon Park
July 2014
Buhm Soon Park is Associate Professor and Head of the Graduate School of Science and
Technology Policy. He completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in
history of science at Seoul National University and received his Ph.D. in history of science
from the Johns Hopkins University. He spent several years at the U.S. National Institutes of
Health as a historian of biomedical sciences and research policy before coming to KAIST in
2007.
Park specializes in the history of twentieth-science and the development of national science
policy. His historical research focuses on the culture of theorization in various disciplinary
contexts. He has analyzed the origins and meanings of such theoretical constructs as
analogies, metaphors, rules, hypotheses, and approximations on the borderland of physics,
chemistry, and biology. His policy research includes the role of bureaucracy in modern
science, techno-nationalism and techno-globalism, and the civic space for scientific debates.
He has examined the policy development of American biomedicine after World War II, the
formation of the Korean nuclear bureaucracy, and the environmental and nuclear debates in
Korea of the 1980s.
Park is author of numerous articles on the history of quantum chemistry, the development of
the National Institutes of Health, and the emergence of technocracy in Korea. He has recently
coedited with Youngsoo Bae the book, Bridging the Technology Gap: Historical
Perspectives on Modern Asia (Seoul National University Press, 2013).