Hello, this is Hyein!
I will be joining the Department of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University as an Assistant Professor in January 2026. I am currently affiliated with the department as a non-resident scholar.
Before joining Case Western, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I worked on a pipeline for building a structured dataset of historical international news content and conducted computational research on elite networks in authoritarian regimes. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Iowa in 2023.
I study how image shapes politics, with a focus on visual politics—how subtle information embedded in visuals influences political communication, elite behavior, public opinion, and more. My research combined methods from machine learning and AI, including computer vision and text analysis, to explore topics such as media framing of protests, portrayals of political leaders, authoritarian elite networks, and the use of AI-generated data in social science research.
