Pukyong National University

PKNU was formed in 1996, by the merger of two long-established South Korean institutions, the National Fisheries University (founded 1941) and the Busan National University of Technology (dating to 1924).

PKNU is located across two campuses in the coastal city of Busan, and fishing remains a key area of study. More than 2,400 students are enrolled in the faculty of fisheries science, and there are fishing research centres in Gijang and Goeseng. Since 2016, PKNU has been home to the United Nations Fisheries University.

Students take classes aboard two state-of-the-art training ships, the Nara and the Baek-yong, the latter launched in 2020 and named for PKNU’s mascot.

Even more students study engineering: almost 12,000 of a student roll of around 30,000, including nearly 3,000 graduate students. Engineers are located on the Yongdang campus, four kilometres and a 10-minute free shuttle bus ride away from the headquarters Daeyeon campus. Since 2015, Yongdang has also been the location for industrial collaboration.

The college of liberal arts was established in 2021, and the college of information technology and convergence opened in 2022. Recent research has been diverse, including several studies of next-generation batteries and an examination of the way teenage smokers pay proxies to evade the ban on buying cigarettes.