About me

I am currently on the academic job market for the 2024-2025 cycle!

You can find my CV here.

I am a PhD Candidate studying just transition to electric vehicles in the Department of Geography, The Ohio State University. I also hold a master's degree in Transportation Engineering from the University of Seoul, South Korea.

My research addresses the justice and equity implications of the energy transition from an interdisciplinary perspective. My dissertation project, titled “Just Transition to Electric Vehicles: Integrating Transportation, Energy, and Climate Justice” particularly addresses the National Academies-identified Grand Challenges and Opportunities for the Twenty-first Century, including (1) curbing climate change while also adapting to its impacts, and (2) developing efficient, healthy, and sustainable cities and communities. My goal is to apply my findings to practice, sustainability education, and community outreach initiatives.

This figure depicts interviewee residential locations in Franklin County by the nearest street intersection (n = 45). I used interviews to test an integrated framework for just transition to electric vehicles. Traffic proximity and volume (percentile) (A), average relative cost and time spent on transportation relative to all other tracts (B), percentage of household income spent on energy costs (C), and susceptibility to disasters from natural or human-caused disasters to disease outbreaks (D). Data from Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (A & B), U.S. Department of Energy (C), and U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit (D).

Climate change is deeply personal for me. Overwhelming majority of my family members are nomads who have been reliant on their livestock for their livelihoods for centuries. However, climate change-induced recurrent droughts wiped out my grandfather's camels in the span of a decade. To fight climate change in the transportation sector, I am studying transportation electrification and the findings will have implications for academic and planning practice milieux beyond U.S. borders. My dissertation project draws on semi-structured qualitative interviews, quantitative surveys, and complexity science (i.e., agent-based modeling) to conceptualize, measure and model just transition to EVs.

My research also makes contribution to sustainable transportation and urban development. My work in this area has spanned 6 years starting in South Korea and culminating in the United States. In South Korea, I studied how Asian cities are different from North American and European contexts in an era of knowledge-based innovation and services in post-industrial cities, and worked with researchers at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University who are developing a database with over 500 projects from more than 40 countries. In the US context, I have researched the impacts of bicycle facilities on residential property values and the impacts of bicycle networks on bike traffic volume in more than 10 cities.