Park is originally from Seoul, where her parents were an architectural engineer and an artist;[1] she was born in 1973.[2] She studied chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia in Canada, earning bachelor's and master's degrees there in 1998 and 2000,[3][2] and completed a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2005 at the Ohio State University.[3] Her dissertation, Carbon dioxide sequestration: Chemical and physical activation of aqueous carbonation of Mg-bearing minerals and pH swing process, was supervised by Liang-Shih-Fan.[2]
In 2007, she became Lenfest Junior Professor in Applied Climate Science and the associate director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering.[4] She became full professor, director of the center, and chair of the department before moving in 2023 to her present position as dean of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.[1][3]