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8th Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon of Korea

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Antà ³nio Guterres was appointed by the General Assembly on 13 October 2016 to be the successor of Ban Ki-moon as he stepped down on 31 December 2016.

Ban was widely considered to be a potential candidate for the 2017 South Korean presidential election, before announcing, on 1 February, that he would not be running.

On 14 September 2017, Ban was elected chair of the International Olympic Committee's Ethics Commission.

Also in 2017, Ban co-founded the nonprofit Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens. He also currently serves as Distinguished Chair Professor at Yonsei University's Institute for Global Engagement and Empowerment.

He became the first major international diplomat to throw his weight behind the Green New Deal, a nascent effort by members of the Democratic Party in the United States to zero out planet-warming emissions and end poverty over the next decade.

Early life and education

Ban was born on 13 June 1944 in the small farming village of Haengchi, Wonnam Township (-myeon), in Eumseong County (Insei), North Chungcheong Province in what was then Japanese Korea.

His family then moved to the nearby town of Chungju, where he grew up.During Ban's childhood, his father had a warehouse business, but the warehouse went bankrupt and the family lost its middle-class standard of living.

When Ban was six, his family fled to a remote mountainside for much of the Korean War. After the war ended, his family returned to Chungju. Ban has said that, during this time, he met American soldiers.

In secondary school (Chungju High School), Ban became a star student, particularly in his studies of the English language.

In 1962, Ban won an essay contest sponsored by the Red Cross and earned a trip to the United States where he lived in San Francisco with a host family for several months.

As part of the trip, Ban met U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

When a journalist at the meeting asked Ban what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, "I want to become a diplomat."

He received a bachelor's degree in international relations from Seoul National University in 1970, and earned a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1985.

At Harvard, he studied under Joseph Nye, who remarked that Ban had "a rare combination of analytic clarity, humility and perseverance".

Ban was awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa) by the University of Malta on 22 April 2009.

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