Shin, Seung-Il: - Seung-il ShinFormer Senior Health Advisor and Director of the IVI Project United Nations Development Programme Shin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brandeis University, and trained in human genetics at the University of Leiden. He was one of the founding members of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland. He then served as a Professor of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York for 14 years, where his research was in somatic cell genetics and tumor biology. He was a co-founder and CEO of Eugene Tech International, a biotech venture based in New Jersey. He led the development and commercialization of a low-cost hepatitis B vaccine in a joint effort with the New York Blood Center, and played a leading role in an international campaign to bring the new vaccine to the developing world. The United Nations Development Programme in 1992 invited Shin to develop and implement a plan for an international center of vaccine sciences focused on the needs of developing countries under the aegis of the Children's Vaccine Initiative, a global movement to expand the availability of affordable vaccines for the world's children. The UNDP-initiative eventually led to the birth of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) in 1997. In this memoir, Shin recounts how, despite some initial difficulties, international partners came together to create IVI and to find a home for it in Seoul, Korea.