Welcome to my website. I recently completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where I also pursued interdisciplinary training in Informatics through the NSF-funded Interdisciplinary Dual Ph.D. Program in Complex Networks and Systems.

My research examines how global governance and international cooperation evolve through relational networks, institutional design, domestic legalization, and external shocks such as climate change. I focus on three main areas: strategic alignment in international institutions, especially informal and non-binding ones; how domestic policies and climate-related shocks reshape transnational flows of people, goods, and vulnerability; and how cooperation networks shape the resilience and evolution of global order. Methodologically, I draw on multimodal data processing, social network analysis, temporal network modeling, bipartite, multilayer, and hypergraph network analysis, computational text analysis, LLM interpretability, and graph neural network modeling such as EvolveGCN to study how institutional design and network structure shape political interactions.

My dissertation, which I defended in August 2026, examines why some soft-law and non-binding intergovernmental organizations remain effective despite weak enforcement. Using APEC as my primary case, I argue that cooperation in these settings is sustained not only by formal institutional design but also by relational hierarchy and networked strategic alignment. I show that cooperation in APEC is structured by bandwagoning and brokerage clustering: economies are more likely to form ties when potential partners are connected through stronger shared partners, and these clustering dynamics vary across issue domains depending on the attributes of the actors around which cooperation is organized.

My broader research includes work on how legal interventions and climate shocks reshape human trafficking networks, China’s participation in ISO standard-setting, and the resilience of global order under contemporary geopolitical fragmentation. A coauthored paper on human trafficking and climate shocks is currently under conditional acceptance at International Studies Quarterly, and other research is currently under review. Before beginning my Ph.D., I worked on APEC policy and capacity-building initiatives at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research and served as coordinator for Taiwan’s Bureau of Small and Medium Enterprise to APEC. For more details, please visit my research page.

I regard teaching as inseparable from research rather than secondary to it, and the chance to teach was one reason I left several years of think-tank and policy work for doctoral study. At Indiana University, I taught across Political Science and Informatics as Instructor of Record for Politics of Global Governance and Data Fluency, and as Associate Instructor for courses including International Organization, Analyzing Politics, and Introduction to Informatics. My classrooms are built around active learning: flipped-classroom activities, real-time polling, case analysis, and assignments that ask students to write for decision-makers and citizens rather than only for other academics. In Data Fluency, students generated a network of their own classroom conversations, entered it into a shared dataset, and analyzed it, which showed them that relational data are not abstractions invented by researchers but records of ordinary behavior.

Generative artificial intelligence has changed what students most need from a methods course. As routine execution becomes inexpensive, the distinctly human contribution moves upstream to problem definition and downstream to judgment and communication. I therefore teach design thinking alongside technical skill, and I design assessment so that independent understanding stays visible without banning the tools students will use for the rest of their careers. I am prepared to teach international relations at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels, along with research methods, computational social science, social network analysis, and R for political data analysis, and I welcome the chance to supervise capstone and independent research in which students build and analyze their own data. As Co-Chair of my department’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Committee, I worked to make sure that students and colleagues of different backgrounds had a real place in the conversation, a commitment that carries directly into how I run a classroom. I also develop introductory materials for data analysis and computational social science; for example, see my R Tutorial page. For more details, please visit my teaching page.

My research has been supported by the Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Ph.D. Dissertation Grant from Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (USD 30,000) and the Taiwanese Government Fellowship for Overseas Ph.D. Study from the Ministry of Education (USD 188,000).