My name is Young Joon Oh—without a middle name. In my case, Young Joon (including the space) is my first name. When I applied for my passport, it was common for Koreans to separate the two syllables of an English first name with a space or hyphen. Although combining them—for example, Youngjoon—has since become more common, I have kept the original spelling. I like to think of it as a small but persistent example of path dependence in personal identity.
I was born and raised in South Korea. I earned my B.A. in Political Science, with a minor in Economics, from Chung-Ang University. I then completed an M.A. at Seoul National University, where I studied voting behavior through rational-choice and formal modeling. This early effort to connect substantive political questions with analytical methods continues to shape my approach to both research and teaching.
Before beginning my doctoral studies, I spent approximately seven years as a legislative aide in the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea. My legislative portfolio spanned several committees:
I contributed to policy research, bill analysis, committee preparation, and legislative strategy across these diverse policy areas. I also served on campaign teams during several major national elections, including the 2004 National Assembly election, the 2006 Seoul mayoral election, and the 2007 presidential election.
These experiences gave me a firsthand understanding of how institutions, competing interests, electoral incentives, and policy ideas interact in the actual process of governance—an understanding that continues to inform my research in political economy and public policy.
In 2015, I received my Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Economy from the University of Texas at Dallas. My dissertation used agent-based and network simulation models to examine bank failures, systemic resilience, and prolonged economic recovery. That project established the foundation for my broader research agenda: using computational models to investigate how interactions among individual actors generate unexpected—and sometimes destabilizing—outcomes at the system level.
After completing my Ph.D., I joined the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. There, I contributed to interdisciplinary research on resilient infrastructure systems and worked across the boundaries of public policy, engineering, and sustainability science.
I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at New College of Florida, where I teach statistical modeling and social network analysis. My broader academic goal is to advance the study of political economy, political behavior, and public policy through computational social science methods and advanced statistical modeling. By combining substantive political economy questions with simulation modeling, network analysis, and statistical inference, I examine how individual choices, institutional arrangements, and complex interactions generate larger political and economic outcomes. Across the different stages of my career—from legislative politics to computational research—I have remained interested in one central question: how can rigorous analytical methods help us better understand and govern complex social systems?