I am an assistant research scientist at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where I co-developed the Mapping Modern Agora Project. I am also a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow at the Better Government Lab at Georgetown’s McCourt School and Michigan’s Ford School. Starting January 2026, I will join The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill as an assistant professor of public policy. Previously, I worked as a senior data scientist at Code for America, where I collaborated with the U.S. government to improve access to safety net programs.
My research has been published or forthcoming in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Nature Scientific Data, Perspectives on Politics [2x], Political Research Quarterly [2x], Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Studies in American Political Development, among others. I am the recipient of the APSA’s Emerging Scholar Award in Civic Engagement (2024), APSA’s Best Dissertation Award in Urban and Local Politics (2022), and WPSA’s Best Paper Award in Asian Pacific American Politics (2020).
I am a computational political scientist focusing on urban, social, and tech policy in the United States. Specifically, I use computational approaches to study (1) state capacity in policy implementation and (2) civic capacity in offline and online spaces. My recent projects seek to identify and reduce administrative burdens in U.S. safety net programs. To achieve this goal, I utilize human-centered design, field experimentation, surveys, data science, and AI, collaborating with state and local governments and nonprofits.
I am committed to bridging research and practice and integrating data science with social sciences. In 2025, I co-founded the Data for Good Roundtables where academics and practitioners come together to discuss using data for good. In addition, I co-organized the first partner location of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) in the Bay Area (2020, co-hosted by UC Berkeley and Stanford) and South Korea (2022, co-hosted by KAIST and KDI School). I currently serve on the Advisory Council of SICSS.
I completed my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Before attending graduate school, I worked as a product manager at a software startup and served as the youngest member of the user service advisory board for the largest internet company in South Korea.
I am currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and plan to move to the Research Triangle in late 2025. To check my talk and travel schedule, please see here.
If you want to connect with me, please reach out via jkim638@jhu.edu / jaeyeonkim@hks.harvard.edu. I would love to get to know you.
Here is a link to my CV.