My brief reflection on attending this year’s GovAI Coalition Summit as one of the few academics: Bridging the Gap: Why Policy Scholars Should Attend Practitioner Conferences jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/bridging-t...

Fellow policy scholars attending APPAM next week: If you work on language accessibility and AI translation/interpretation at the local level, I would love to discuss. You can reach out to me via [email protected]

📅 Excited to share my next week's APPAM schedule! Fellow social and tech policy scholars: I’ll be presenting and discussing research on administrative burden, AI, and tech governance across four sessions next week in Seattle:

2nd day at the GovAI Coalition Summit

Working paper alert 📢 Link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... I was very fortunate to be part of this impactful research on the science of protest. This is one of those projects where the sum truly feels greater than its parts.

Here at the GovAI Coalition Summit until this Friday

APPAM is next week. It's definitely one of my favorite communities, academic or otherwise. This year marks the 47th APPAM research conference. In this post, I share what Duncan MacRae Jr. wrote about his experience at the very first one, held in 1979 in Chicago: substack.com/home/post/p-...

This Thursday, I shared what my postdoc (or post-PhD) experience was like and how I used that time to bridge my dissertation work with my long-term research direction.

Don't talk about it much on here, but I co-direct a research lab, and here is an update of what we are up to. cc @sebjilke.bsky.social @pamherd.bsky.social @giannella.bsky.social @jbarofsky.bsky.social @jaeyeonkim.bsky.social bettergovernmentlab.org/so/c6PeDbgsR...

GovAI Coalition Summit is next week, and I’m looking forward to connecting with procurement professionals and researchers working to make the process smarter, more effective, and more accountable. I see procurement as both a key bottleneck and al lever for enabling government innovation.

I wrote a short reflection on my appreciation for my mom. I came from a working-class background, but she made the difference: jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/dear-mama?...

Stanford's RegLab is also hiring a new executive director: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/executi...

Upturn is hiring a new Executive Director: www.upturn.org/join/executi...

Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971

This week's reading list. Some of these are rereads. One of them, When Care Is Conditional, is by Dani Carrillo, an old friend from my graduate school years. I was in political science, and Dani was in sociology, but we were both part of the Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop (IIW).

open.substack.com/pub/jaeyeonk... New from me: What Universities Are For

It was an absolute pleasure and honor to give a talk at the PRIISM seminar today at NYU: steinhardt.nyu.edu/events/ident... Many thanks to Klint Kanopka and Ravi Shroff, and it was wonderful to see you Alex Chohlas-Wood!

I’m giving a virtual talk this Wednesday at NYU (PRIISM Seminar) on how we can improve government services through design and data, in ways that advance an agency’s mission. You can register here and I would like to learn from you: steinhardt.nyu.edu/events/ident...

New from me: Data Scientists Don’t Have Power But May Have Influence. You could replace “researchers” with “data scientists,” but I think the lessons still hold. open.substack.com/pub/jaeyeonk...

jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/the-contra... Based on my talk at SAIS in DC today, I updated my post on The Contracting State and AI Policy. I hope it’s useful. I’m also very grateful to the many students who signed up and attended despite midterm exams, and for their thoughtful questions.

14번째 더나은미래 칼럼입니다. 보이지 않는 가난, 어떻게 보이게 할 것인가: futurechosun.com/archives/132... 복지가 필요한 이유는 특정한 사람이 문제가 아니라, 특정한 상황이 문제이기 때문이다.

My first book review of the year: Maraam Dwidar’s Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy (University of Chicago Press, 2025). jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/book-revie...

New from me: I’ll be giving a talk on this topic (though under a different title) at SAIS in D.C. this Wednesday. open.substack.com/pub/jaeyeonk...

My first Substack post: jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/how-to-not... How to Not Give Up

jaeyk.github.io/us_ac_career... 지난 여름에 한국에서 많은 대학원생들을 만나서 대화를 해 보고 생각했던 점들을 정리해 보았습니다. 1. 대학원생은 더 이상 학생이 아니다 2. 대부분의 논문은 쓸 필요가 없다 3. 연구를 잘 하는 방법은 지속적 개선뿐이다

jaeyk.github.io/essays/acade... It's or going to be a flyout season for academic job market candidates. Here are my reflections on how to give a job talk or have a good conversation around your research agenda.

Giving a talk at Johns Hopkins SAIS this coming Wednesday (Oct 15th, in person, in DC). Many thanks to Melissa Griffith for the kind invite! If you’re interested in responsible AI, especially how procurement can serve as a lever to achieve it, please join us. www.eventbrite.com/e/move-fast-...

Go Bears! That’s our second Nobel this year (Physics and Chemistry). Counting across the UC system, that makes four. More broadly, go public universities!

The full moon over the lake

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

My book w/@profsorelle.bsky.social will be out in January! These ideas have brewed since I interned at Queens Legal Services 20 years ago. The book is for anyone who cares about people, justice, power & democracy. Much more to share more in the coming months! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

FYI, if you try to measure the strength of civil society (what Hahrie, Milan, and I call civic opportunity in our 2023 Nature Human Behaviour paper), you may want to consider using our org-, county-, and ZIP code-level datasets published in Scientific Data: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fellow political scientists: I don’t know why we’re so obsessed with 2×2 matrices, or why every PS presentation involving such a matrix starts with the same joke, “We all love a good 2×2 matrix, hahaha.”

My department is hiring! We have one TT-line focusing on environemntla policy, international development, and poverty: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

DC friends: I'm excited to share my ongoing research on procuring AI technologies at the state and local level in the U.S. government (joint work with Aniket Kesary, Fordham Law) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on October 15, 1–2 pm EDT.

It’s not easy to see, but this is San Francisco’s Department of Social Services canvassing plan in Chinatown, 1969. DSS and the local Office of Economic Opportunity targeted five poverty areas, and Chinatown had the lowest enrollment.

Afternoon break

"When I did sense something exciting and fundamental, I sniffed my way toward it and became involved in it almost without plan or forethought." -Herbert Simon

Today I had the great pleasure of presenting my published and ongoing work on reducing administrative burdens in U.S. safety net programs for the EAAMO Inequality Bridges Working Group: bridges.eaamo.org/working_grou...

This fall, I have been getting a constant stream of emails asking whether I accept graduate students. Most social science PhD programs (including ours) make admissions decisions at the department level. Therefore, I welcome discussing the prospect of advising your work once you are admitted to UNC.

Three talks are scheduled this month and in October (EAAMO, NYU, Johns Hopkins SAIS). I'm very excited to give a virtual talk at the EAAMO-Bridges Inequality Working Group tomorrow. EAAMO stands for Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization.

This year, I am finally back on track with my long-stalled book project (monograph). I’ve spoken with several editors and many friends who’ve gone through this process, and I aim to complete my first draft by next summer. You can read more about the book project here: jaeyk.github.io/book_project...

Great-tailed grackle, right? Spotted it during the morning walk.

"Whether programs adapt well to their environments can be determined only by continuous evaluation." - Aaron Wildavsky (1983). Regarding Pressman and Wildavsky's 1971 Implementation (the 1983 3rd edition). Still insightful. I recommend all six books in the UC Series on the Oakland Project.

Now this JPAM paper was published in issue: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

People often say that academic research is like a marathon rather than a sprint, usually to emphasize pacing. But in my experience as both a runner and a researcher, I found its deeper commonality to be learning to embrace pain.

I have a feeling that an academic career is a good option for someone who is committed to common goods but not interested in running for office, entrepreneurial but without the capacity to manage a large group of people or the willingness to take substantial financial risks, ...

Sunday service

I started drawing again. It has been a while, so I’m a bit rusty.

I found pleasure in reading and joy in writing from early on. In college, I was a regular op-ed writer and even published several trade books before starting graduate school (a new edition of one of my Korean trade books is forthcoming next year).