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. 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, a civic tech nonprofit organization, where I collaborated with the U.S. federal, state, and local governments to improve access to safety net programs.
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.
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 serve on the Advisory Council of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science and co-organized its first partner locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and South Korea. I also helped create South Korea’s first policy-focused data science graduate program while I was a faculty member at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management.
I completed my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, where I served as a Senior Data Science Fellow at D-Lab and as a Graduate Student Researcher at the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Before attending graduate school, I worked as a product manager at a software startup and was the youngest member of the user service advisory board of the largest internet company in South Korea. I wrote about my non-linear career path here.
I am currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area and plan to move to the Research Triangle in late 2025. If you want to connect with me, please reach out via jkim638@jhu.edu.
Here is a link to my CV.