A warm welcome to Speaker Soon-Young Yoon, who is the United Nations (UN) representative for the International Alliance of Women and author of “Citizen of the World—Soon-Young and the UN” (Ewha Womans University Press, 2021). In  2019, she was appointed to the Gender Advisory Panel convened by H. E. Ambassador Volkan Bozkir, the President of the 75^th UN General Assembly. Many will know her for her previous role as Chair of the NGO CSW/New York, the committee which launched the Cities for CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) campaign in the United States. A Social Development officer for UNICEF in the Southeast Asia office, Yoon was a Social Scientist at WHO/South East Asia Region in New Delhi, where she served as a focal point for numerous social science related programmes, including those for HIV/AIDS, and tropical diseases. She additionally serves as a global advisor for the French ‘Action Contre le Tabac – ACT’ campaign and sits on the executive committee of the CoNGO committee on rare diseases.

A former columnist for the EarthTimes newspaper, she is co-editor with Dr Jonathan Samet of the WHO monograph, “Gender, Women, and the Tobacco Epidemic.”  Other recent writings include a paper with Sarah Hawkes and Ken Buse on “Gender Responsive Tobacco Control”. She is a former Fulbright scholar and professor of anthropology at Ewha Womans University and serves on the Global Advisory Board of the Harvard AIDS Initiative. Yoon received her A.B. in French literature with honors, a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan and has a certificate in computer graphics from the Pratt Institute of the Arts. She is married to Richard M. Smith, former Editor-in-Chief and President of Newsweek and current President of the Pinkerton Foundation. 

Welcome! We look forward to hearing from you and sharing in your knowledge and expertise.