Woo was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and attended an international high school in Tokyo, Japan. Her father, Yong-Hai Woo, was a noted economic planner and diplomat who led the reparation mission for South Korea in Japan. She graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College, majoring in history. She has received an M.A. in international affairs, and Latin American studies, and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. Her dissertation was awarded the university's highest distinction. Her brother-in-law, Cho Yoon-je formerly served as South Korean ambassador to the United States.
Career
Woo serves on the board of the American Hospital of Paris Foundation, as well as the Council of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation in Charlottesville, Va. She is a trustee of the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh; and in her capacity as the Director of International Higher Education Program, serves ex officio on the board of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and the Governing Board of the European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania. Woo was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the Presidential Commission on U.S.-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy. She has consulted for the World Bank, the United States Trade Representative, Social Science Research Council, Asian Development Bank Institute, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, the Asia Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of East Asian Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, as well as Contemporary Politics Series on Comparative Political Economy, published in Beijing. She serves as an occasional guest expert on Asian politics for such media outlets as PBS, CNN, and The New York Times. Woo taught at Columbia University and Northwestern University as assistant and associate professor. She then became Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her teaching and research interests include international political economy, economic development, East Asian politics, and U.S.-East Asian relations. She became Associate Dean for the Social Sciences of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University. In 2008 she was appointed as the Buckner W. Clay Dean of the College and Graduate School at the University of Virginia. During her term as dean, she restructured the graduate programs, reallocating resources across 25 PhD granting programs based on performance, and significantly improving the amount and number of fellowships, and providing for the first time multi-year guarantees. In the six year period she raised a total of $260 million for the School, and oversaw completion of five new construction projects. In 2015 she took leave of absence from the University of Virginia to direct the International Higher Education Program for the Open Society Foundation, which was responsible for creation and support of over fifty liberal arts colleges in the former Soviet bloc countries. She refocused the effort to supporting higher education for refugee populations, particularly Syrians in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, as well as the Rohingya population, dispersed in Burma, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Sweet Briar College announced that Woo would become the 13th president of the college; and was instated on May 15, 2017, replacing president Phillip C. Stone. Within six months of her arrival, Sweet Briar College underwent a comprehensive restructuring, consisting of an academic reset that replaced general education with a core curriculum on women leadership; tuition reset which brought down the published tuition from $50,000 to $21,000; and a curricular realignment that brought the number of majors from 42 to 16. In the fall following the restructuring, first year enrollment went up 42 percent.
Works
She has authored and edited seven books, published mostly under the name Meredith Woo-Cumings. They include Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization, which was published under the name Jung-en Woo; Past as Prelude: History in the Making of the New World Order ; Capital Ungoverned: Liberalizing Finance in Interventionist States, The Developmental State, as well as the co-authored report of the Presidential Report, "Building American Prosperity in the 21st Century: Report of the Presidential Commission on United States-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy". Her book Neoliberalism and Reform in East Asia was the result of a project sponsored by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the Rockefeller Foundation. She also published a book of essays under the title, Something New Under the Sun: Education at Mr. Jefferson's University. She was executive producer of Koryosaram, The Unreliable People, a film about Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Koreans during the Great Terror. It premiered at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and won the Best Documentary Award from the National Film Board of Canada in 2008. *
