Oran Kwon, Ph.D.
Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Dr. Kwon is a professor in the Department of Nutritional Science & Food Management and director of the BioFood Network, which was sponsored by MKE (Ministry of Knowledge & Economy), at the Ewha Womans University. After receiving her Ph.D. at the Ewha Womans University in 1992, she had been working as a researcher at National Institute of Health and Korea Food and Drug Administration in Seoul, Korea for 18 years. In the meantime, from 1995 to 1997, Dr. Kwon visited the laboratory of Molecular & Clinical Nutrition Section at NIH in Bethesda, USA as a postdoctoral fellow. While at US NIH, she described for the first time how vitamin C metabolite dehydroascorbic acid is transported by different glucose transporter isoforms. For another 3 years from 2001 to 2003, she visited the same laboratory as a research fellow. At that time, she demonstrated that flavonoids have a novel mechanism of action to regulate nutrient absorption in the intestine by using molecular biology, biochemistry and animal biology. Just before joining the Ewha Womans University in 2008, she was a director of the Division of Food Supplement Evaluation and Standards and played an important role in implementing the new regulation in Korea. From 2008, as a faculty member of Ewha Womans University, she is actively involved in researches and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level. Her current research is focused on functional foods, especially on studies how multi-components in culinary foods give impacts on the health from preclinical to clinical levels. In 2010, she became director of the BioFood Network, a multi-center research program to evaluate the functionality of the foods. Dr. Kwon is a member of many scientific organizations and committees and she has been an advisory board member of Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forest and Fisheries, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea Food and Drug Administration and ILSI-Korea since 2008.