“I am the biology department at the Utah Asia Campus,” Hye-Joo Kwon, associate professor (lecturer), shared during her recent visit to the University of Utah. Kwon tries to make the trip from Incheon, South Korea every other year, and this time it was packed: faculty meetings, tours of campus facilities and an idea exchange with BIOL 1615 and BIOL1610 instructors, Kurzhals and Tanner.
Asked what struck her as the biggest difference between the two campuses, she turned the question around: “What do you think is unique about living and learning at the U of U campus?”
Easy answer. Utah’s outdoor access is hard to beat—world-class skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing—all within reach. But Incheon, where the U’s Asia Campus is in a major high-tech smart city and international business district called Songdo, is different, Kwon said. “It’s part of the ultramodern … district, so it’s entirely walkable, and it has an efficient transit system that puts Seoul and [points] beyond within easy reach. There’s also K-pop, a thriving beauty industry, and high-tech streetscapes. The students love it. It’s a genuinely different way to learn.”
For STEM, business and entrepreneurship-minded students, the location is a strategic opportunity. Songdo sits inside one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical clusters, home to companies like Samsung Biologics, Celltrion and Merck—giving students a front-row seat to industry well before graduation, from internships to potential employment.
Kwon discussed those opportunities with School of Biological Sciences Director Fred Adler, along with a related idea: recruiting exceptional undergraduate science majors to work as Teaching Assistants (TAs) or Learning Assistants (LAs) in her biology courses, and potentially other STEM offerings. The roles would sharpen their teaching and science communication skills and could pair naturally with an internship in the biotech cluster, turning a semester in Incheon into both a professional and academic credential.
The opportunities run the other direction, too. Kwon and Adler also discussed the potential for pairing industry research collaborations with teaching appointments or guest lectures that benefit students and faculty alike.
Back to biology: Kwon currently teaches the Utah Asia Campus’ three GenEd offerings: BIOL1610, and BIOL1030, which are based on the same courses taught in Utah. Next up is adding BIOL 1615, the lab companion to BIOL1610. This addition would let biology and chemistry ma
jors, or pre-health students, complete their GenEd and entry-level science coursework almost entirely at the U Asia Campus. Rebekkah Kurzhals, associate professor (lecturer) who leads the BIOL 1615 labs on the main campus, is guiding Kwon in assembling the equipment to mirror that experience in Songdo. The curriculum has students collecting and culturing soil samples in search of microbes with therapeutic promise, like next-generation antibiotics—work that’s already led to promising, student-directed discoveries in Utah.
As an instructor, Kwon sees GenEd science courses as a critical learning opportunity that can
help students identify a career path or just gain an appreciation and foundational understanding of the process of science and its role in innovation. “One of my students started in the Games B.S. major at the Utah Asia Campus,” she said. “He took my BIOL1010 and BIOL1030 courses, and he told me that through those classes he realized there were so many fascinating areas of biology that he had not known about before. He later also served as an LA for my BIOL 1610 course. He will be finishing his degree at the main University of Utah campus and hopes to continue into a master’s program at the U of U, with an interest in game-based clinical interventions.”
Kwon is hoping to get the word out on the many opportunities offered through the U Asia Campus. So, if you’re interested in learning more about studying there or possibly working as a TA/LA (in Kwon’s classes or others), or even connecting with some major biotech companies, do some research about the University of Utah Asia Campus.
The University of Utah Asia Campus opened in 2014 as part of the Incheon Global Campus, sharing facilities and programming with George Mason University, SUNY and Belgium’s Ghent University. Instruction is entirely in English.