Soyoung Park received her B.S. in Chemistry from Ewha Womans University in 2002, where her undergraduate research with Prof. Sukbok Chang first inspired her to pursue organic chemistry. To deepen her training in synthetic chemistry and broaden her research perspective, she moved to Japan to pursue her Ph.D. at Kyoto University under the supervision of Prof. Tamio Hayashi and Prof. Ryo Shintani. Her doctoral work focused on palladium-catalyzed cycloaddition reactions.

After completing her Ph.D. in 2009, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Hiroshi Sugiyama at Kyoto University as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, where she pioneered a new research direction in DNA-based asymmetric catalysis.

In 2012, Soyoung began her academic career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Kyoto University, where she expanded her research into chemical biology based on functional nucleic acids. In 2021, she moved to the Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC) at The University of Osaka as an Associate Professor, taking on a new challenge in immunology.

In 2026, she joined the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo as an Associate Professor. Across each stage of her career—from organic chemistry, to chemical biology, to immunology—her research has continued to evolve toward a broader question: how nucleic acids connect chemistry, evolution, sensing, and immunity.