With its track record as the graduate school of the number one think tank in Asia, KDI School attracts promising educators and researchers to join its roster of high caliber academic mentors. This semester, the school welcomes yet another top-notch faculty member with Professor Byungkoo Kim joining KDIS.

I sat with Professor Kim to get to know him a little better and to welcome him to KDIS. Below is an excerpt of my interview with him:

Welcome to KDIS Professor Kim! Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about your background and field of expertise? 

My name is Byungkoo Kim. I go by BK as well. BK sounded better, so I let people call me BK. I was born in a town named Pohang, where I spent 20 years of my life. It’s about a 3-hour trip to the south-east of Korea and actually more populated than Sejong City.

I moved to Seoul for college and took up English literature and linguistics at Seoul National University. After my military service, I started taking some international relations and political science courses and they were intriguing enough to convince me to pursue a graduate career in political science in the same institution.

I then went to the University of Michigan where I did my PhD in Political Science and Master’s in Statistics. My expertise is in data science and international political economy. My research is essentially about taking data science approaches to understand international political economy processes.

What motivated you to join and pursue this institution as a professor? What qualifications and experiences do you bring to your new role as a professor at our school?

There were many people who recommended KDIS to me when I was in the US. I also knew KDIS before they recommended it to me, but I didn’t have any inside information. I heard good things about KDIS, and the one thing that boosted my interest is the strong research support and the fact that professors are highly evaluated through research. Aside from this is the fact that it’s located in Korea, which means that I will be working in a similar culture. So far, I feel like things are turning out to be good.

I believe I can bring a new breed of scholarship, data science, which can be combined with other substantial fields such as international political economy. It’s not entirely new, but my approach can easily be combined with other areas of study that other faculty members at KDIS pursue.

What are your teaching philosophies and strategies? How do you plan to engage students and promote active learning in your classes?

I am personally a fan of learning by doing. I usually incorporate research project presentations in my courses, especially with quantitative measure courses. While in-class lectures are important, I think that applying the lesson more will make learning easier and more useful. Learning by doing essentially pushes you to apply the methods you saw in the lecture slides 1 or 2 weeks after the class through problem sets and research project presentations.

What research interests or projects are you currently working on or planning to pursue? How do you plan to involve students in your research or scholarly activities?

I have about 3-4 ongoing projects that I am working on right now. Most of them are about understanding the dynamics of global supply chains and how they reshape the contours of global trade governance, such as the design of the trade agreements. 

For instance, one project, Global Production Sharing and the New Demands for Deep Preferential Trade Agreements, centers on how global supply chains reshape the preference of domestic interest groups, and this affects the design of the trade agreements based on the composition of the nation's economic structure. 

Normally, in global supply chains, we are not interested in how production takes place in other countries, but if you are exporting, say an engine model to a foreign country which assembles the engine to build cars and exports them to other countries, then you also have an interest in overseeing the assembly lines. Things like labor standards, environmental standards, production standards, intellectual property rights, all these non-trade issues become important in the global supply chain aspect. I am looking into building a theory or establishing a causal mechanism that links the domestic interest groups into the increasing complexity trade agreement designs.

In my future projects, I might involve students through RA work - or students can also bring and discuss related work with me for possible collaboration.

How do you plan to contribute to the academic community at our school? Are there any initiatives, collaborations, or innovations that you are excited to be a part of?

I'm already talking with Professor Seunghun Kim, he’s interested in international political economy, so we are currently working on playing with some data to study economic security issues, which is a popular area of interest these days.

We are interested in the chip war between the US and China and its impact on other countries. I'm also interested in network analysis, and Professor Jaehyuk Park is an expert on this, and so I am excited to discuss a possible research collaboration with him too. There is also an Applied Data Science Lab that I'm interested in.

I’ve only met a few of the faculty members, and so I might discuss more of this possible research in the coming days and see how I can collaborate more with some of them in various areas.

Can you share some examples of how you have mentored or guided students in their academic or career pursuits? What kind of support do you plan to provide to students in your role as a professor?

As a senior in graduate school, I helped first and second year students in scheduling their course work, career, conference schedules etc. which I think is something that I can also bring here at KDIS. As someone who just finished graduate school, I am very close and familiar with the graduate school life.  I am quite familiar with how the job market works for students, so if they are interested in joining academia, I have very fresh information that they can use.

Also, with my background in taking English literature as my undergraduate major, then switching to international relations, and then adding statistics to my field to become a data scientist, if someone is interested in becoming a data scientist without a strong background in this field, I can probably help and recommend ways to nurture their skills.

Is there anything else you would like to share with the students, faculty, and community at our school? What are you most excited about in joining KDI School? 

I will meet you guys in class! Machine learning is an emerging field across the world, and so I will try my best to entertain your interest and give you enough skill sets to get out of class and do research. I personally think that I am good with teaching my field of expertise, so that is one thing that I hope to bring to the students. 

As a community, I can share my data science skills and so I look forward to having the chance to present some of my researchers particularly in the field of data science. My office is open so there is no need to wait for the semester to start, students can visit me to discuss subjects and concepts related to my field of expertise. 

Outside of his academic life, Professor Kim also shared that he is into watching movies and reading non-academic books. In his free time, he particularly likes reading non-fiction books on space programs and the universe and the history of humankind and how we evolve. 

Professor Kim will be teaching the Machine Learning Course for Social Scientists course in the fall semester as well as quantitative method courses like QM, R and Programming starting next year. You can read more about his research and professional experience here: 

https://kdischool.ac.kr/faculty/view.es?mid=a10401010000&type=1&keyword=Kim&emp_no=311000356