Tina J. Park, Ph.D.
Founder & C.E.O.
Dr. Tina J. Park is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Park Group (TPG) Inc., a global consulting firm focusing on international security.
As one of Canada’s top experts on North Korea and the Asia-Pacific region, she serves as a voice of authority on Northeast Asia, Canadian foreign policy and NATO in the media. To date, she has conducted over 1,000 live and pre-taped media interviews for various television, radio and print new media around the world, such as BBC, Al Jazeera, CBC News channel, the National, CBC Radio, CPAC, TVO, LBC, LPR, CTV News, Global News, CP24 & CNN and more. Some of her media interviews can be found here. She is also an active contributor to Canada’s print outlets, such as Globe and Mail, OpenCanada.org, and Maclean’s.
From 2010 to 2020, Dr. Park served as a Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, based at the University of Toronto. The CCR2P is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization aimed at advancing scholarly engagement and political implementation of the R2P principle. To date, Dr. Park has advised over 30 governments and regional organizations on their policies with regards to R2P and human rights, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, NATO, the European Union and the InterAction Council, and addressed the UN General Assembly’s annual dialogue on R2P at the United Nations Headquarters in New York every year since 2013. She also contributed to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s annual report on R2P since 2012. She remains as a passionate advocate of human dignity and equality and has travelled to some 90 countries to promote global humanitarianism. Dr. Park is co-author a several book chapters on R2P, including The Role of Business in the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and R2P and Cyber Space: Sovereignty as Responsibility (NATO CCD COE, 2020) along with numerous articles.
An award-winning scholar, her Ph.D. research at the University of Toronto focused on a century of bilateral relations between Canada and Korea under the broader history of globalization in the 20th century. Her thesis, which employed a cross-disciplinary methodology to study the evolving relationship, has been recognized as one of the most definitive scholarly works on the history of Canadian-Korean relations, drawing on original interviews and archival records from both countries. Since 2010, Dr. Park has taught undergraduate students at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University on Canadian foreign policy, Asian-Canadian history and the history of espionage and intelligence.
During her fellowship at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Dr. Park engaged with top-level military officers from NATO countries and partner nations and published a seminal work on NATO’s strategy with regards to North Korea. Dr. Park specializes in nuclear weapons proliferation, cyber security and maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region. She has an extensive experience as the country expert for North Korea at the Centre for Intercultural Learning at Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and has trained high-ranking members of the Canadian Armed Forces on security in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as the North Korea Task Force and various minsters and senior civil servants in NATO countries. Dr. Park has published extensively on North Korea and security in the Indo-Pacific region, most recently with the Spanish Ministry of Defense in Madrid. She has also recently co-edited a volume on Canada and the Indo-Pacific (Sutherland Press), co-authored with Dr. Fen Hampson (Carleton University) and Goldy Hyder of the Business Council of Canada.
Dr. Park is an enthusiastic champion of gender equality and female representation in federal politics in Canada. She co-founded the U of T Women in House program with the Hon. Carolyn Bennett in 2013. To date, this innovative program has taken some 1,000 bright, young female students from U of T to shadow an MP or a Senator for a day on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and to engage in an intimate Q&A session with a Supreme Court Justice at the Supreme Court of Canada, in addition to a special Q&A with Governor-General at the Rideau Hall and a networking reception featuring cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and civil servants.
A former competitive figure skater, Dr. Park enjoys travelling, sailing and oil painting in her spare time. Dr. Park speaks six languages and has a decade of experience as a certified translator & simultaneous interpreter, including at G20 summits. Dr. Park is a fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, a Vice President and Director of the NATO Association of Canada, a fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, and remains as a proud alumna of Trinity College and Massey College.