Su Yen was born in 1978 and grew up in the close family of a senior government official in Taiwan. After obtaining her Diploma in Advertisement Design at Shilin High School of Commerce in Taipei City in 1997 Su Yen spent a year working for a high class woman's fashion house. In 1998 Su Yen went to university in Kaoshiung and gained her first degree in Interior Design; she was awarded the top prize for her final design project in 2003 and won several national design competitions in the field of community planning. Meanwhile, a variety of part-time jobs undertaken during her study at university, such as being a lab assistant, project assistant, computer operator and computer sales person, customer service and engineering assistant, provided great opportunities for her to study human nature and to learn various communication skills for different occasions. Su Yen's first impressions of the buildings of Oxford transformed her interests from being a modern designer to the study of the development and conservation of historic buildings. Following her first Masters Degree in Spatial Planning at Oxford Brookes University in 2007, Su Yen obtained a second Masters Degree, with a Distinction for her written dissertation, in Historic Conservation at Oxford Brookes University in association with the University of Oxford. She is also the illustrator for the Picture Poetry Notebook Series based on Dear Su Yen, the photographer and editor for the English Culture and Life Notebook Series, and designs the covers for books published by Snowflake Books Ltd. Roy trained first as a scientist and then as an environmental designer with a particular interest in the history of ideas in landscape design. Roy's doctorate was on the subject of landscape beauty and its conservation. For over twenty years Roy gave regular courses at Rewley House in the University of Oxford on Historic Houses and Gardens with special emphasis on the contexts of ideas at different periods. These courses were provided for visiting alumni and academics from a number of American universities including Chicago, Austin-Texas, Northwestern, Michigan State and Virginia, and for the American Bar Association. For the last twelve years Roy has been a tutor to international postgraduate students in the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University. Roy has published two academic books (Designs on the Landscape, Belhaven, 1991; and Starting Research, Pinter, 1994) which are read in many countries, and various papers and articles.
