Yang Hyang-ja

Yang Hyang-ja (Korean: 양향자; Hanja:梁香子; born 4 April 1967) is a South Korean politician previously served as the 28th president of National Human Resource Management Institute (NHI) of Ministry of Personnel Management under President Moon Jae-in. She was the first woman to lead the Institute since the relevant position was founded in 1960s.

After graduating from Gwangju Girls' Commercial High School, she went to Samsung Electronics at the age of 18 (or 19 in Korea) as an assistant to semiconductor memory researchers at the company. Since then she had worked for the company's departments related to memory semi-conductors for over three decades. In 2014 she was promoted to the executive for its flash memory development becoming its first female executive without higher education, from Honam region and one-year earlier than her co-workers.

She completed tertiary education while working at Samsung. She earned a bachelor degree from now-Cyber University of Korea, which was co-founded by Samsung in 2000, in 2005 and masters from Sungkyunkwan University, which has close partnerships with Samsung, in 2008.

She was contacted by then-party leader Moon Jae-in in late 2015. She resigned from Samsung in December 2015 for her political career which began in 2016 when she officially became member of Democratic Party and later nominee for Gwangju constituency at the 2016 general election. After losing her election, she continued her commitment to politics. She was one of five elected members of Supreme Council of party for two years before resigning for the president of the NHI in August 2018. She is expected to run for the same constituency in the upcoming 2020 general election.

Yang's biography, Fly Towards Dream Beyond Dream, Hyang-ja