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Grant Spotlight: Professor Chaerin Yun Examines Sustainable Development in Ongoing Research

Story by Tian Quinn; edited by Jessica Cook
Dec 1, 2022

In the Bertolon School of Business, Professor Chaerin Yun works as an assistant professor of Management. Since joining the university in 2018, one of Yun’s goals has been to elaborate on the Bertolon School of Business’s refreshed mission to incorporate the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in its teachings and operations. For Yun, aligning her intellectual contributions with the business school’s mission and its commitment to societal impact means incorporating SDG into her scholarly research and teaching. 

In 2021, Professor Yun partnered with her former colleagues, José Godinez from UMass Lowell and Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello from Merrimack College, to lead a research project on sustainable development. The next spring, Yun received a 2022 Research APR Grant from the Center for Research and Creative Activities to support her work investigating how foreign direct investments (FDI) will improve SDG in sub-Saharan African countries.  

The research’s current hypothesis suggests that inward FDI will have a positive relation on African SDG. While developing this hypothesis, Yun presented at a few conferences to receive feedback on the early stages of her research, including the African Academy of Business Development annual conference in May. Yun was able to attend the conference, which was held in Ghana, remotely via Zoom to receive the perspective of local experts and scholars in Africa, which prompted her to modify her theory and direction of hypothesis.  

After receiving feedback, Yun decided to expand her initial data set to include a larger research period as well as consider the variable of political risk in the research process. Since adapting these factors, Yun notes that most of her time on the current research involves the data managing process. Currently, Yun notes, the research is more than a third complete. The co-authors plan to submit the research to a journal by the end of the next academic year. 

In the classroom, Professor Yun aims to enhance the quality of her teaching through her personal research experiences. In her courses on international business policy and strategy, Yun asks students to consider corporate social responsibility (CSR) and how this concept impacts the role of businesses on broader society. In these discussions, Yun draws attention to the interconnected nature of businesses in the world while addressing connections between FDI and SDG improvement.  

Professor Yun notes that she feels fortunate to begin sharing the early stages of her research with the Salem State community, and is grateful to have had the opportunity to develop her research further during the Research APR. 

Thank you, Professor Yun, and good luck with your research! 

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Do you want to share your research and creative activities with the SSU community? Contact the CRCA at ssu-crca@salemstate.edu and tell us what you’ve been up to! 

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