Born in
Kaesong, Won began his college education in
North Korea, graduating from
Wonsan Agricultural College (원산농업대학) in 1950 with a degree in
animal husbandry and joined there for work. With the outbreak of the
Korean War in that year, he escaped to the South with a brother, while his parents and one brother remained in the North. Pyong-oh worked as a veterinary lieutenant on the front and he left military service in 1956 as a captain and joined the South Korean Department of Agriculture. He obtained a second degree in biology from
Kyunghee University in 1959 and moved to Hokkaido working on a doctoral thesis that he received from
Sapporo University in 1961. He was appointed to a permanent position at the
Kyung Hee University and in 1962 he went to Yale to work under
Sidney Dillon Ripley. He became a full professor of zoology in May 1969. He headed the South Korean Society for Nature Conservation from 1992. In 1965, a
Daurian starling ringed by Won in Seoul was found and reported by his father. This was the first contact between the two men after they were separated by the war. He managed to smuggle a letter to his father through the assistance of Soviet ornithologist
Leonid Portenko. ==References==