Meet some of the recent or imminent UIUC Political Science PhDs currently searching for employment.
Seongjoon Ahn researches and teaches on the intersection of public opinion, political behavior, and normative democratic theory. His research focuses primarily on the variations in people’s conceptions of democracy and their consequences. His dissertation, In the Name of Democracy: Composition, Variation, and Measurement of Democratic Conceptions, investigates in what ways conceptions of democracy differ among Americans and how these differences relate to key political behaviors and attitudes on democratic backsliding. His research has been supported by the Rapoport Family Foundation Dissertation Survey Grant, the Civic Health and Institutions Project, and the Humane Studies Institute’ s Humane Studies Fellowship, among other internal and external grants and scholarships. In addition, he is a recipient of the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Graduate TAs, a prestigious award given to only six recipients each year among 2,500 graduate students across more than 50 departments in the college.
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.
Myung Jung Kim is a Minerva Peace and Security Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, and a Research Fellow at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. She specializes in International Relations, focusing on the intersection of international law and armed conflict. She seeks to explain how the domestic and international legal landscapes evolve and influence combatant behaviors, conflict processes and outcomes, and the accountability of actors responsible for crimes committed during conflicts. In her dissertation, she examines the impact of the rapid expansion of international criminal prosecutions targeting rebels on the dynamics of civil conflict. Prevailing scholarship emphasizes how the international justice regime undermines amnesty, thereby affecting peace negotiations between rebel groups and governments. Kim identifies an overlooked issue: rebels seeking refuge in foreign territories to evade punishment. The dissertation examines how internal and external threats of punishment, particularly through the International Criminal Court and Universal Jurisdiction, influence rebel behaviors and civil war outcomes. Specifically, it tests the effects of the international justice regime on (1) rebel safe havens, (2) amnesty provisions, and (3) conflict duration and outcomes, including civilian targeting. The analysis integrates a large-N study with two original datasets (1946-2023) with cross-case studies that include interviews with rebel leaders and peace experts.
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)
Jing Li is a PhD candidate with a research focus on the use of computational and statistical methods to study important substantive questions related to mass political behavior and political economy in the American and comparative contexts. His research projects include: dynamic modeling of mass partisan polarization and segregation; machine learning model evaluation for binary classification tasks; the contextual and temporal variation of individuals’ attitude towards globalization; a Lasso-augmented time series alternative to the synthetic control method; bootstrap standard errors for matching estimators; and, meta-analysis as a multiple hypothesis testing problem.
Isaiah Raynal is a quantitative and qualitative researcher with 4 years of research design and data analysis experience. His primary expertise is in designing, administering, and analyzing the results of original surveys and survey experiments as well as performing text analyses. Substantively, he is interested in better understanding people’s attitudes and behaviors. From helping his Graduate College to better understand their students' needs to using his dissertation as an opportunity to identify solutions for reducing animosity between Republicans and Democrats, Isaiah is always seeking out projects that aim to improve real-world outcomes and inform decision-making. He is actively seeking a full-time role in research, data analysis, or project management. (LinkedIn)
Shuyuan Shen is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Comparative Politics and Chinese Politics. His research explores political communication and political economy of China and other autocracies, using computational and experimental methods. His dissertation investigates how the Chinese government and media manipulate foreign news for domestic gains. His work appears in International Studies Quarterly and World Development.
Research Interests: Comparative Politics, Chinese Politics, Computational Social Science
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).
Søren Warland is a Ph.D. Candidate in the subfield of American Politics with a focus on interest groups and environmental politics. Søren is primarily focused on developing teaching and mentorship skills and has previously taught Women & Politics and Racial & Ethnic Politics at UIUC. They have also accumulated experience teaching environmental politics, having developed a political ecology course to be taught in the spring of 2025 and serving as a teaching assistant and instructor in the Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences. In addition, Søren has served as a research mentor for three years as part of the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) and the advisor for Illinois in Washington (IIW), a program where students spend a semester learning and working in Washington D.C.