Meet some of the recent or imminent UIUC Political Science PhDs currently searching for employment.
Do Young Gong is a Ph.D. candidate, specializing in International Relations with a focus on political violence, political economy of conflict, and methodology. Her research broadly explores the determinants and consequences of political violence from three interrelated angles: how different forms of violence – civil wars, coups, and protests – interact; how economic foundations shape violence and what economic consequences violence generates; and how domestic violence influences external economic, diplomatic, and military engagement, and how, in turn, such engagement reshapes domestic violence. Her dissertation specifically examines the interdependence between coups and civil wars. It investigates (1) the impact of wartime coup attempts on civil war management and resolution, (2) the varieties of post-coup politics and their consequences for civil war dynamics, and (3) the effects of civil war dynamics on different types of coup attempts. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly and World Development.
Ji Soo Yoo is a Ph.D. Candidate. She researches and teaches on international cooperation, climate change politics, and comparative subnational climate policy. Her dissertation, The State of Disastrous Climate Policies, examines how climate vulnerability—particularly from recurring weather disasters—drives subnational governments to independently adopt adaptation or mitigation measures. At Illinois, she has served as Instructor of Record for Introduction to Global Studies and designed and taught Global to Subnational: Actions for Climate Change, an 8-week seminar that connects her research on subnational climate action to teaching innovation. She holds multiple teaching certificates, including the Dr. Sandra J. Finley Teacher Scholar Certificate and the Certificate in Technology-Enhanced Teaching. Beyond the classroom, she has mentored a undergraduate student through the Research Apprenticeship Program, guiding them toward independent research and professional development.
Jing Li is a PhD candidate with a research focus on the use of advanced computational and statistical methods to study mass political behavior in the American and comparative contexts. His research has been published on PLOS ONE and presented at major conferences in political science and causal inference. His ongoing research projects include: computational modeling of mass partisan polarization and segregation; the validity of synthetic control methods under network diffusion process; machine learning model evaluation for binary classification tasks; the contextual and temporal variation of individuals’ attitudes towards globalization; meta-analysis as a binary classification problem; reducing algorithmic bias through comprehensive model evaluation, etc.
Matthew Mettler is a scholar of American political behavior whose research explores how citizens navigate information environments, form political judgments, and fulfill their democratic roles. His dissertation examines how partisan identity, cognitive resources, and media cues shape perceptions of fact and opinion, offering insights into the erosion of shared empirical foundations in civil discourse. Beyond his dissertation, his research agenda spans several projects on misinformation, including work on conceptualizing and measuring the multidimensional structure of political information and misinformation, the use of linguistic markers of political falsehoods as an intervention for citizens to combat misinformation, biased political memory, and economic recollection and perceptions during election cycles. He has coauthored a book manuscript that provides a systematic account of how citizens justify their own policy preferences and whether they can articulate the best arguments for the opposing side, offering a novel perspective on the quality of democratic reasoning. His broader work investigates democratic backsliding, religious influences on political judgment, and individual perceptions of institutions, with particular attention to how experiences spill over across institutional domains and how institutional reforms shape symbolic and substantive representation. Mettler's research has been published in Misinformation Review, Politics & Religion, and Social Science Quarterly.
Caleb Griffin is a PhD Candidate who studies political psychology with a focus on social identity. Specifically, he studies regional and religious identities and how those affect both our perceptions of others and our political behaviour. His dissertation is about the power of elites to prime and alter both regional identities and the social geography of our world more broadly. This work includes a year of field work in Morocco supported by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Award.
Ikromjon Tuhtasunov is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. He studies how participatory institutions shape citizens’ perceptions of state legitimacy in authoritarian settings, and his dissertation centers on participatory budgeting in Uzbekistan. More broadly, his research engages broader debates on the politics of local public-goods provision and on the conditions under which ordinary citizens update their political beliefs in non-democratic regimes. In the fall semester, he serves as the instructor of record for PS 391: Soviet and Post-Soviet Foreign Policy.
Seung-Uk Huh is a Ph.D. candidate whose research interests include international and comparative political economy, international development, and international law, with a particular focus on the tension between global capitalism and domestic politics. His dissertation project examines the conditions under which states are likely to resolve investor-state dispute settlement claims through settlement, focusing on the roles of government partisanship and the types of government actions that lead to such claims.
Jinwon Lee is a PhD candidate with a research focus on international security and alliance politics. Her research broadly examines the dynamics between patrons and protégés in military alliances. Specifically, she analyzes how protégés respond to patrons' military commitments and policy decisions, the interaction between a patron's military commitments and non-proliferation policies affecting its protégé, and the credibility of nuclear extended deterrence. She has investigated these topics using original large-N data and conducting archival research for in-depth case studies on the US-South Korea and China-North Korea alliances and their intra-alliance relations. (LinkedIn)
James Steur is a Ph.D. Candidate with research interests in American Politics, political psychology, and quantitative methods. His primary research agenda explores how factors beyond rationality, like emotions, influence citizens’ political decision-making and attention. His dissertation investigates the causes and consequences of sadness in US Politics, employing interviews, surveys, and original experiments. Additionally, James has served as a Policy & Research Legislative Fellow ($22,000) with the University of Illinois Center for Social & Behavioral Science, where he supported a state legislator in addressing issues of blighted housing in rural Illinois. His accomplishments include: Rapoport Family Foundation Grant ($15,000); Princeton Dissertation Scholars Program Grant ($12,000); Subject Pool Coordinator, Illinois Political Science Department (communicated with 600 students and all faculty members each semester and facilitated data collection for 28 research projects).