By Faye S. Wolfe

When I was three or four, I used to say, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a professor!’” recalls Yeonhwa Park. Appointed to the Frederick J. Francis Endowed Chair in 2004, the young food science professor has already satisfied that ambition—and is on to other goals: uncovering secret properties of foods that prevent or treat major diseases. The International Life Science Institute North America recently gave Park a 2007 Future Leader Award to fund her research.

To endow the chair, highly respected food chemist Jack Francis ’54G used proceeds from his avocation of stock market investing. A gardener as well, the UMass Amherst professor emeritus would probably like Park’s computer screen background, a scene of forsythia blooming by a Buddhist temple. “I don’t know where that is,” Park says. “My dad sent it to me. He’s retired, and he looks all over and sends me pictures.”

It’s thanks to her father, who taught high school math, that Park is a food scientist. They struck a deal: If she majored in pharmacology, as he wanted her to, she could go to graduate school. “In Korea, if you graduate with a pharmacology degree, you can always find a job,” she explains. At Seoul National University, in Park’s hometown, she discovered there was more to pharmacology than she’d thought: Chemistry, biology, and traditional herbal medicines used in Asia were among the subjects covered. She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in the subject at Seoul, followed by her PhD in food science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her master’s thesis, “I had 13 kilograms of dried [ginko] leaves to work with—that’s a lot,” says Park with a laugh, outlining a big bag with her hands. “Eventually we extracted anticoagulants from it.”

These days Park is researching conjugated fatty acids CLA and CAN, found in ground beef and other foods, as a potential means of increasing bone mass and treating cancer, arthritis, and heart disease. Ginkgo seeds are also on her research plate. “I want to look at some of the less popular vegetables that have not been investigated as much to find if they might be beneficial dietary items,” said Park. A traditional Asian treatment for respiratory ailments, ginkgo seeds, Park believes, might be a source of asthma medicine. (Don’t try concocting a remedy at home, though: Raw seeds are toxic.)

She hasn’t far to go to get ginkgo seeds for experiments. “I was on the bus going by Lederle, and I looked up and there was a ginkgo tree outside the window,” she says. “There are six trees on campus.”