Eunji Emily Kim

Eunji Emily Kim is a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research examines how political institutions and other societal actors respond to emerging technologies under conditions of uncertainty, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. She studies how AI-related risks and opportunities are interpreted, translated into policy agendas, and addressed through institutional and political processes. Her current work examines U.S. AI legislation, policy diffusion and framing, AI incident reporting, and broader patterns of public and expert discourse surrounding emerging technologies. Methodologically, she combines computational social science, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and qualitative approaches to study the development and evolution of technology governance.

Emily earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and M.S. in Statistics from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an M.A. in Political Science and International Affairs from Seoul National University, and a B.A. in Political Science and International Trade from SungKyunKwan University. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Future Initiatives and previously served as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP), where she contributed to national R&D policy coordination and evaluation initiatives.

Plans for Fellowship: During the fellowship, Emily will complete and publish several papers emerging from her doctoral research while expanding her work in new directions. One line of research examines how AI policymaking develops across levels of government, with particular attention to the relationships among local, state, and federal policy responses. A second explores AI governance in high-stakes settings, focusing on how institutions can preserve meaningful human oversight as AI becomes increasingly integrated into consequential decision-making. Through these projects, she aims to develop a broader account of how governance structures evolve in response to rapid technological change and the new forms of uncertainty it creates.