Lumen's team has decades of experience in fieldwork, research and publishing, advocacy, engineering, and policy in authoritarian regimes with a focus on North Korea.
Board of Directors
Jieun Baek
Founder & Director
Jieun is leading the LUMEN team in their impassioned efforts to bring information into North Korea. She authored "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society." She received her Bachelors and Masters in Public Policy at Harvard, and her PhD from the University of Oxford.
Martyn Williams
Board Member
Martyn is the founder of North Korea Tech and a non-resident fellow at The Stimson Center. He closely follows North Korean technology and media and in 2019 authored “Digital Trenches, North Korea’s Information Counter Offensive” for the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea.
Sarah Yun
Secretary & Treasurer
Sarah Yun is a Grants Officer for the Cyber Initiative and Effective Philanthropy programs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she works to align program strategy with operational excellence. Sarah began her career as a Protection Officer for North Korean refugees in Southeast Asia. She has spent the majority of her career as a management consultant for mission-driven leaders on governance, financial sustainability and performance measurement. Sarah holds a bachelor’s degree in Government from Harvard University and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sylvia Kim
Board Member
Sylvia Kim is the General Partner of CerraCap Cares - an impact fund unleashing the power of technology for good by investing in early-stage human-centered technologies that aspire to reduce disparities and empower the underserved. As a former human rights lawyer and multilingual non-profit executive, Sylvia has over 15 years of experience in rights-based advocacy, strategic planning, and fund development. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Sylvia received her Bachelor’s degree at Queen’s University, her Juris Doctor from Osgoode Hall Law School, and completed her Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law (LL.M. equivalent) at Oxford University.
Board of Advisors
Andrei Lankov
Professor Lankov is a Director at NK News and writes exclusively for the site as one of the world’s leading authorities on North Korea. A graduate of Leningrad State University, he attended Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University from 1984-5. In addition to his writing, he is also a Professor at Kookmin University.
Sokeel Park
Sokeel serves as South Korea Country Director for Liberty in North Korea (LiNK). As well as overseeing LiNK’s Seoul-based programs and operations, he works with North Korean defectors and experts to develop analysis and strategies to accelerate change and opening in North Korea. Park regularly briefs policymakers and the international and South Korean media, and was co-director of The Jangmadang Generation, a documentary highlighting social change in North Korea. In 2019, Park was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II for services to UK-Korea relations.
Greg Scarlatoiu
Greg is the Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) in Washington, D.C. Scarlatoiu is also vice president of the International Council on Korean Studies (ICKS). He holds degrees from Seoul National University and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and graduated from the MIT XXI Seminar for National Security Leaders. He is fluent in Korean, French, and Romanian. A native of Romania born and raised under that country’s communist regime, Scarlatoiu is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Sungju Lee
Sungju is the author of Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea. He is currently doing a doctoral program, on Fulbright Scholarship, in peace and conflict resolution at Carter School, George Mason University. He has BA in political science and journalism from Sogang University; MA, on Chevening Scholarship, in international relations from University of Warwick.
Declan Cummings
Declan has over eight years of experience working on capacity-building efforts for North Koreans. Since 2014, he has helped organize and run one of the premier leadership programs for North Korean defectors in the United States, the Washington Leadership Program by the Korean American Sharing Movement, whose alumni have been some of the first defectors to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees in the US. He is the head of engineering at Cinder, a startup building a trust and safety platform for the internet, and was formerly a Security Engineer at Facebook in Washington, DC.
Nat Kretchun
Vice President for Programs at the Open Technology Fund (OTF). Mr. Kretchun oversees operations of OTF’s multi-million dollar funding portfolio. He previously served as a senior associate director at InterMedia, where he managed research projects with a focus on Asia and hard-to-access populations. He has designed, fielded, and analyzed studies ranging from large-scale nationally representative surveys of China to qualitative studies examining digital communication patterns among Uyghur populations. Since 2009, Mr. Kretchun has done extensive research with North Korean refugees, defectors, and travelers; run annual surveys; and conducted qualitative studies for a number of government and non-government clients. Mr. Kretchun is the primary author of A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment and its follow-up, Compromising Connectivity: Information Dynamics Between the State and Society in a Digitizing North Korea.
The Team
Engineers & Technical Experts
Field Researchers
Grants & Finance Manager
Country Expert
Director of Communications and Projects
Director of Social Impact
Team members’ information remains confidential for security reasons.