Researcher · MPA Student · Engineer

Jihwan
Oh

Bridging technical logic with public administration. Specializing in AI governance, sociotechnical systems, and disaster resilience — building tools that lower the administrative burden citizens face.

Disaster & Crisis Management Science & Technology Policy
Jihwan Oh
Sungkyunkwan University · MPA
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About

I started as a student of public administration — drawn to the question of how societies organize themselves, resolve conflict, and make collective decisions under uncertainty. The more I studied, the more I noticed something striking: social phenomena follow patterns disturbingly similar to natural ones. Public conflicts cascade like physical systems. Policy adoption curves mirror epidemic spread. Risk perception behaves like a force with its own inertia.

That observation changed everything. If social systems have structure, they can be modeled. And if they can be modeled, they can be studied with precision. That realization is what pushed me to learn software engineering — not to become a developer, but to gain a sharper lens for the phenomena I was already studying. Code became a research instrument, the same way a survey instrument or an institutional framework is.

This cross-disciplinary instinct has shaped my entire research trajectory. From KORAD-supported studies on nuclear waste siting — where I mapped the structural relationship between risk perception and public acceptance — to investigating AI ethics impact at KISDI, and analyzing undocumented migrant children's policy through Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework, each project has been an attempt to treat social complexity with the rigor it deserves.

Underlying all of this is a deeper preoccupation: accidents and disasters. Not as isolated failures, but as symptoms of how modern societies are organized. As our world grows more interconnected and technologically layered, the problems we face are becoming less like puzzles with clean solutions and more like tangled, wicked problems — where causes are diffuse, consequences are systemic, and conventional governance frameworks fall short. I believe we are overdue for a fundamental paradigm shift in how societies anticipate, interpret, and respond to catastrophic risk. My long-term ambition is to be part of that shift — as a scholar who bridges sociotechnical theory, policy design, and empirical rigor to rethink how we govern complexity before it governs us.

My research philosophy is rooted in that same conviction: social science deserves better infrastructure. Too much insight is buried in fragmented literature, lost between disciplines, or inaccessible to researchers without deep technical training. That gap is what Galpi.AI, an AI research assistant I am currently building, is designed to close — a system meant not just to retrieve information, but to think in the logic of policy analysis and social inquiry.

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Experience

2026 · Jun — Present
Researcher (Full-time)
Urban Policy Research Center · Sungkyunkwan University
Conducting field investigations and qualitative surveys on local village communities (e.g., Jinan-gun) to collect empirical data for regional policy research. Independently developed a Vision AI model for historical document recognition, digitizing unstructured archival data to enhance text extraction and policy analysis. Synthesizing field data and AI-driven archival insights to support evidence-based urban policy formulation.
2024 · Jan — Dec
Undergraduate Researcher
Center for Social Conflict Research · Ajou University
KORAD-supported socio-technical studies on nuclear waste management. Analyzed multifaceted approaches to resolving complex public conflicts using SPSS and R.
2024 · Sep
Research Assistant (RA)
Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI)
Conducted foundational case research for AI Ethics Impact Assessments on AI-based video synthesis services. Systematically categorized qualitative data to identify ethical trends and support AI governance framework development.
2023 · Sep — Dec
Administrative Intern & Team Leader
Suwon City — Youth Participation Group for Policy
Supported municipal policy development through the Collegiate Administrative Internship. Conducted comprehensive research on laws, budgets, and case studies; facilitated evidence-based policy formulation via field investigations and expert consultations.
2020 — 2025 · President (2024–2025)
Neulsarang — Campus Education Service Club
5 years 10 months
Led community service initiatives as organizational head. Orchestrated long-term academic mentoring for students at Myeongryuk Children's Home, and designed interactive learning programs to enhance social integration.
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Research & Publications

Under Review
Post-crisis recovery and the sequence it assumes: Program design implications from a three-year panel of disaster survivors in South Korea
Under review · Sole-authored · 2026
Journal
Analyzing Factors Affecting the Acceptability of High-Level Radioactive Waste Repositories: Focusing on the Risk Perception of Fukushima Contaminated Water within the VBN Model
Public Policy Review (formerly Legal & Political Review), Vol. 41, No. 3 · December 2024
Conference
Trends and Systematic Literature Review of Nuclear Energy Acceptability Research in South Korea: Focusing on Public Administration and Policy Journals (2000–2025)
2026 Spring Conference · Korean Association for Policy Analysis and Evaluation (KAPAE) · April 2026
Conference
Discussions on Policies for Undocumented Migrant Children for Social Integration: Focusing on the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF)
Korean Association of Immigration Policy Summer Conference · June 2025 [Oral Presentation]
Conference
The Effect of Residents' Right to Self-Determination on Responsive Behavior in Selecting Sites for Radioactive Waste Disposal Facilities: Analysis of the Moderating Effect of Social Capital
Korean Radioactive Waste Society Autumn Conference · October 2024 [Poster]
Conference
A Comparative Study of Hydrogen Energy Policy Aspects in the Era of Carbon Neutrality: Focusing on Suwon, Yongin, and Hwaseong Cities
2024 Spring Joint Conference · K-CCUS Association & Korean Society for Energy and Climate Change · May 2024 [Poster]
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Projects

AidPage
Live
A citizen-side disaster support navigator for Korea. Starts from a situation ("my home flooded") instead of a statute, and shows possible relief payments, deadlines, documents and the nearest place to file — plus 19 facility types, hazard points and plain-language "today" actions per neighborhood. Built from a finding that those who have not recovered rarely even apply: the tool tries to break that first link. Rules carry their legal basis and date; it never adjudicates. A KakaoTalk chatbot answers "warnings for Gwanak-gu" from the same public data.
Administrative BurdenGISPublic DataAccessibilityChatbot
5-jihwan.github.io/aidpage →
AidPage Simulator
Live
Route risk · nationwide H3 grid
Pick a start and a destination on the map and it compares the shortest path with one that avoids known hazards — flood history, steep cells, road underpasses — on a 223,855-cell nationwide grid. Runs Dijkstra twice in a Web Worker on the device, weighted by the scenario (active warnings, heavy rain, landslide). It reports what each path crosses and how many extra minutes avoidance costs; it never declares a route "safe".
Route RiskH3 GridWeb WorkerEvacuation
5-jihwan.github.io/aidpage/sim.html →
Galpi.AI
In Development
An AI research assistant for the social sciences — built not just to retrieve documents, but to reason in the logic of policy analysis. Designed to connect fragmented literature, theory, and evidence across disciplinary boundaries, making rigorous research accessible to scholars without deep technical training.
AIResearch InfrastructureNLP
Archival Vision AI
Active Research
An end-to-end recognition and translation pipeline for pre-modern Korean archival documents written in cursive script (choseo). Independently developed detection and recognition models digitize handwritten village-compact records, with LLM-assisted translation — turning centuries of unread local governance archives into analyzable data for policy-history research.
Vision AIOCRDigital Humanities
Interactive Research Companions
Private until publication
Web applications that accompany working papers — letting readers explore the data, toggle model assumptions, and watch findings respond, instead of reading static tables. Built with React and modern web tooling; each companion is released alongside its paper's publication.
ReactData VisualizationOpen Science
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Research Keywords

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Core Theory
Policy Domain
Method
Emerging Interest
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Contact

Always open to conversations on risk governance, sociotechnical systems, and disaster resilience — or anything that treats social complexity with the rigor it deserves.

Jihwan Oh — Researcher & Engineer