I am an assistant research scientist at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. 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. Previously, I worked as a senior data scientist at Code for America, a civic tech nonprofit organization, where I collaborated with the U.S. federal, state, and local governments to improve access to safety net programs. I completed my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. My research has been published in top outlets such as Nature Human Behaviour and received the Best Dissertation Award in Urban and Local Politics (2022) and the Civic Emerging Scholar Award (2024) from the American Political Science Association.
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, and surveys, collaborating with state and local governments and nonprofits. My research has been made possible by generous support from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Research Foundation of Korea, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, Blum Initiative for Global and Regional Poverty Studies, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UC Berkeley.
In addition to my substantive interests, through my work on computational social science and data science pedagogy, I am actively engaged in bridging social sciences and data science and making computational methods accessible.
I am on the job market (political science/public policy/data science) in the 2024-2025 academic year.
You can reach me at jkim638@jhu.edu.
Here is a link to my CV.