Vice Provost Simon awarded Fulbright to study in South Korea

ASU's Vice Provost for International Strategic Initiatives, Denis Fred Simon, has been chosen to receive a Fulbright Award for specialized study in South Korea. The award is designed for senior academic administrators with an internationally focused job portfolio.

Simon will travel to different cities and universities across South Korea to study best practices in university internationalization. As part of a team of eight Americans and eight South Koreans, Simon will spend two intensive weeks sharing experiences and exchanging ideas in June.

As a frequent visitor to Northeast Asia throughout his career, Simon first traveled to South Korea in 1978 and has been engaged in collaboration with Korean scholars and think tanks on numerous occasions. 

While his primary academic specialty is focused on Greater China and his main foreign language is Mandarin Chinese, Simon has written several articles about South Korea's science and technology policy. He was involved in the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea through a combination of Asian sports and “electronics” industry diplomacy when the two countries still did not have formal diplomatic contacts. With Simon's aid, they used the Asian Games as an informal mechanism to begin discussing meaningful cooperation as well as trade and investment relations in consumer electronics.

“The timing of this Fulbright Fellowship awarded to Vice-Provost Simon could not be better as ASU has had South Korea on its radar for a long time in terms of greater engagement regarding student recruitment, research collaboration and scholarly exchanges,” said Elizabeth Phillips, University Provost and Executive Vice President.

Simon plans to use his time to not only learn more about the South Korean higher education system, but also to forge long-term institutional partnerships and alliances with key academic and research institutions. 

“At ASU, we continue to strive to be globally engaged and my hope is that we can make South Korea one of the important components of ASU's international network of strong partners," Simon said. "South Korea already has demonstrated that it is committed to the idea of global connectivity. Thus, it is natural for ASU to have a strong presence across many fields and disciplines.”

According to the fall 2012 report on enrollment, ASU has a total of 310 students studying at the university from South Korea.