Professor Suchan Chae

SUCHAN CHAE, an economist, professor, vice president of Planning and Budget, director of the Center for Bio-Healthcare Innovation and Policy and director of the Center for Regional Innovation at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, is a former National Assemblyman of Korea. He also serves as the chairman of the board of the Han River Society.

 

As vice president of Planning and Budget, he oversees planning and funding for new education and research initiatives. He also serves as the Chief Financial Officer of the KAIST and manages its assets. He is working on enhancing KAIST’s intellectual property and technology commercialization capabilities.

 

As an economist, his current scholarly interest is to investigate the structural causes of global financial crises. Since 2010 he has organized Pharma-Healthcare Economic Forum meetings where policy makers, experts, and business people gather to discuss issues in health system and healthcare industry.

 

While in the National Assembly, he was a member of the National Policy Committee, which had oversight over the Financial Supervisory Committee and the Fair Trade Commission, and also a member of the Finance and Economy Committee, which had oversight over the Ministry of Finance and Economy and the Bank of Korea. He also served as the Special Envoy of President Roh Mu-hyun to the 2005 World Economic Forum at Davos. During the Asian economic crisis, he advised Korean policy makers including President Kim Dae-jung, and wrote many columns both in Korean and worldwide newspapers regarding the solutions to the crisis.

 

Before he was elected to the Korean National Assembly, he had been an economics professor at Rice University for almost 20 years. He earned a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics in his native South Korea before coming to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1985. 

 

Mr. Chae's professional publications have mostly been in the areas of bargaining theory, industrial organization, and general economic theory.  He has held visiting positions in universities and research institutes in several countries including Cornell University, University of British Columbia, Brookings Institution, and IAE in Barcelona, and has been a visitor at CEPREMAP in Paris, C. O. R. E. in Louvain-La-Neuve, and University of Mannheim. In South Korea, he has been a visiting professor at Seoul National University and a visitor at the Korea Development Institute, Korea Information Society Development Institute, Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Samsung Economic Research Institute, and Korea Energy Economics Institute.