Jae Yeon Kim

I am a PhD candidate in Political Science and a D-Lab Senior Data Science Fellow at UC Berkeley. I will be an Assistant Research Scholar at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University between July and December 2021. I will join the KDI School of Public Policy and Management as an Assistant Professor, starting January 2022.

As a computational social scientist, my research agenda is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of social sciences and data science. My current research interests are divided into two streams: (1) data science for social science and (2) social science for data science. For the first research line, I use big data and machine learning to conduct large-scale policy, opinion, and behavioral research, especially among marginalized populations. For the second research line, I use social science to build more fair and inclusive automated decision systems. My dissertation examines the politics of solidarity in multiracial America, and my other research concerns political behavior in the U.S. and beyond.

My research has been published or is forthcoming in academic journals and conference proceedings, including Political Research Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, Journal of Computational Social Science, and Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Data Challenge Workshop. My research has also appeared in popular outlets such as the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. I am the recipient of the Western Political Science Association’s 2020 Don T. Nakanishi Award for distinguished scholarship in Asian Pacific American Politics.

I am also a research software developer and data science educator. I have either developed or co-developed six R packages for computationally intensive social science research. I have taught computational social science at both graduate and undergraduate levels in semester-long courses and short workshops. I am currently working on an open textbook project titled “Computational Thinking for Social Scientists."

To learn more about my research, please visit my website.