ACADEMICS from a university in York visited Korea and Thailand earlier this year to strengthen ties that have been forged over decades.
The team from the University of York School for Business and Society travelled to the countries to encourage cooperation around health, social security, and criminal justice.
Professor Neil Lunt, who visited Korea, said a key part of the trip was a visit to an organisation called KIHASA – the Korean Institute for Health and Social Affairs – a large public research organisation which does research on a range of social policy and health areas.
Professor Lunt said: "We have strong and longstanding links with Korea. We were one of the first university departments in the UK to have several public servants from Korea doing PhDs and postgraduate study here.
"As a result, we have some well-established relationships with people that were graduates here 20 years ago and are now in a range of positions in the public sector, in government, and in academia. We now try and get out to Korea at least once a year to keep those networks alive.
"The KIHASA current president, Lee Tae Soo, spent a sabbatical in York in 2013. We have renewed our memorandum of understanding with them which means we collaborate in all sorts of ways, writing research reports together and giving seminars."
After the trip to the organisation, the team met up with several York alumni in Seoul and had a seminar in which they had two presentations from former PhD students now working back in Korea - and two from University of York staff.
The final leg of the trip saw a visit to the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice, with an eye towards beginning a formal relationship with them.
In Thailand, Professor Bob Doherty met up with colleagues Dr Carolyn Snell and Dr Antonios Roumpakis for a series of meetings. At the United Nations Development Programme, they discussed how Government, private enterprise, social enterprise and third sector collaborations could tackle sustainable development goals.
Next stop was the British Embassy, where they met three of the senior team and discussed the REFOCUS Newton programme.
Professor Doherty said: "We also held a number of meetings at Thammasat University, where the Associate Dean of International Affairs is Pred Evans, a former regional director of the British Council who I have worked with since 2013 on social entrepreneurship in Thailand.
"At the Thammasat University Business School, we discussed preparing an MoU to be signed on their trip to York on October 24 for a workshop on ‘Tackling Grand challenges for Business and Society’.
"Finally we had a meeting with several faculties from Mahidol University. We discussed potential research collaboration around food systems work, particularly on policy work, as well as circular economy approaches."
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