I am an assistant professor of International Relations and Korean Studies at Leiden University. I study the relationship between political institutions and individual preferences, particularly how democracy shapes national identity, attitudes toward migration, and political behavior. My work draws on surveys, experimental designs, and computational text analysis, and is situated at the intersection of comparative politics and digital humanities. Regionally, I focus on East Asia, with an emphasis on the Korean Peninsula, but I draw on cases in other regions where appropriate.

I also maintain an active program of applied research on innovation policy, entrepreneurship, and the digital economy. I am working increasingly on machine learning for text analysis and developing pipelines that integrate OCR, vision-language models, and large language models to analyze large quantities of text.

Motivated and informed by my research, I teach courses on computational text analysis, comparative politics, and Korean studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Beyond Leiden, I serve as Director of Research at SinoNK.com, a Senior Fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna, and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto. These affiliations reflect my commitment to publicly engaged scholarship and policy-relevant research.

I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in Global Affairs and Policy from Yonsei University, and a B.A. in Political Science from Harding University.

To learn more about my current work, visit the Projects page for an overview of active research, or explore my Research for peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and other scholarly output.