Greetings from Ewha Womans University! It is a great honor and privilege to offer my remarks as the seventeenth President of Ewha Womans University (Fig. 1).
Ewha Womans University was founded in 1886 in Korea to educate girls and women, who were not provided with any social rights just because of their gender. Ewha’s mission since then has been to open the door to education and empowerment for women and girls (Figs. 2, 3). And in 1887, it opened the first women’s hospital in Korea, named “Bo Gyoo Nyeo Kwan,” which means to help save women broad and wide, since women were not allowed to be treated by male doctors according to the custom of Confucianism of the times.
Ewha opened the first College of Medicine for women in South Korea, and now has two teaching hospitals – the Ewha Mokdong Hospital and the Ewha Seoul Hospital which opened in 2019. Ewha will celebrate its one hundred thirty-fifth anniversary in May 2021, and continue its mission to heal and improve the lives of people in South Korea, and to educate and train women medical doctors and scientists. We will expand our mission to women and girls around the world to ensure that women have equal opportunities for education including medical training, and have access to the best medical care without barriers.
Since 2020, the world has experienced a pandemic that has exceeded earlier pandemics in terms of the scale and speed in which it affected people all around the world. We are reminded of the tremendous vulnerability of people in front of a virus that has spread with great speed and deadly effect around the world due to the hyperconnected world we live in, and the damage we have done to the natural environment through rapid urbanization and industrialization.
We at Ewha recognize that we must work hard across all disciplines to analyze the virus and its effect on humans, to care for those people who have been inflicted with the virus, and to help mitigate if not prevent another pandemic from destroying our lives.
Along with the Fourth Industrial Revolution now underway, we must take up the challenge for digital transformation in all disciplines. In particular, we note that the medical field is no exception with the need to embrace artificial intelligence, big data, neuroscience and biotechnology and more. Ewha with two teaching hospitals, College of Medicine and the research university in Sinchon encompassing the full spectrum of academic disciplines including Letters and Arts, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Nursing, Pharmacy, Music, Fine Arts and Design, Law, and Social Sciences, provides a rich ground for convergence research between Medicine and all other fields (Fig. 4). Thus, we have announced the establishment of the research and education cluster, named, “Ewha Leading-Edge MediㆍHealthcare Cluster (ELEC).” ELEC is the nucleus of Ewha’s advancement for global excellence in research that will help find solutions for today’s global medical and healthcare problems, and to heal all people with “No One Left Behind” as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promote.
The Ewha Medical Journal will spearhead Ewha’s efforts for finding solutions for global, regional and local medical and healthcare challenges with sound research, and contribute to the advancement of medical research, and disseminate the findings for best practices in order to help save lives around the world. I wish the Ewha Medical Journal to continue to inspire and nurture medical scientists all around the world.
