I am an assistant professor of International Relations and Korean Studies at Leiden University and an affiliated researcher with the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH). 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.

I study how political institutions shape individual preferences, including national identity, attitudes toward migration, and political behavior. My work sits at the intersection of comparative politics and digital humanities, drawing on surveys, experimental designs, and computational text analysis. Regionally, I focus on East Asia, with an emphasis on the Korean Peninsula.

Increasingly, my research relies on building research corpora from archival and other hard-to-use sources, combining OCR, vision-language models, and large language models to work with bodies of text that were previously difficult to analyze. Additionally, I maintain a portfolio of applied research that examines innovation policy, entrepreneurship, and the digital economy.

My teaching covers many of the same methods. At Leiden I teach computational text analysis and digital humanities for Korean Studies, including Digital Korea, an introduction to text-as-data using Korean-language sources, as well as courses in research design and international relations. I supervise BA and MA theses across four programs, in International Studies, Korean Studies, Asian Studies, and International Relations. I also develop and maintain open educational resources for research methods and computational text analysis, including curated Korean-studies corpora and open-source tools for experimental design and pre-submission manuscript review.

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.

For more, see Projects for an overview of active and recently completed projects, Research for an overview of published work and working papers, and Teaching for links to my teaching resources.