The sense of support and community was palpable when Sojun Park, a postdoc on the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), delivered a recent presentation on The Global Diffusion of AI Technologies and Its Political Drivers. The event, a part of the CIS Global Research and Policy Seminar, filled the venue with audience members from across MIT.
“My work is directly connected to what CIS faculty have previously done on international trade and security,” Park said afterwards. “If I hadn’t received a postdoctoral fellowship and are available to MIT, I wouldn’t have been capable of think through the safety implications of my mental property research. I’ve been tremendously motivated by these scholars.”
Park’s time at CIS has been each grounding and transformative, offering him a scholarly home that has shaped his research and helped broaden his mental horizons.
Pursuing interdisciplinary research and connections
Before pursuing a tenure-track position, Park set his sights on conducting research at MIT. When he got here across a public posting in regards to the CIS Postdoctoral Associate Program, he took a likelihood and applied.
“My very own research is interdisciplinary, and I knew that I could really profit from the interdisciplinary environment at MIT, and specifically at CIS, where faculty are coming not only from political science, but in addition affiliated with the Department of Economics and MIT Sloan [School of Management],” he says.
Park was thrilled to receive the paid fellowship, which offers a tutorial 12 months at MIT and dedicated office space at CIS. At MIT, he’s free to make use of his time toward his own research, and has found value in pursuing topics which are of interest to the CIS community — whether it’s AI or global governance. He’s published prolifically along the way in which, including two articles within the and the .
He’s also continued to work on his forthcoming book, “From Privilege to Prosperity: Knowledge Diffusion and the Global Governance of Mental Property,” which examines how technologies might be transferred legitimately across borders. “By ‘legitimately,’ I’m asking under what circumstances would firms volunteer to share their technologies? I’m concerned about institutions and institutional environments that allow large businesses to share their technologies with smaller businesses based in the event world that will not possess the flexibility to provide you with their very own technologies,” he explains.
Throughout the spring 2026 semester, he’s collaborating with the middle’s Undergraduate Fellows Program. This program enables postdocs to work on their research projects with MIT undergraduates. Park is working with two CIS undergraduate fellows to develop a brand new dataset examining international trade in green technologies. This chance reconnects Park to his early academic experiences in South Korea that set him on the trail to MIT.
Path to MIT
“Students in South Korea are trained to be problem-solvers,” explains Park, who was born and raised in Seoul. The country’s rigorous college entrance exams reward those that can answer essentially the most questions quickly and accurately in a limited period of time.
While taking a test in highschool, Park stumbled over an issue that he couldn’t answer, no matter how much time he spent concentrating on it. He handed within the exam, but took the issue home and spent hours puzzling over it — he just couldn’t let it go. “In hindsight, I see this because the moment I made a decision that I desired to turn out to be a scholar,” Park says.
While majoring in international studies and economics (statistics) at Korea University, he had the chance to take part in a semester-long exchange program on the University of Texas at Austin. There, Park enrolled in a political science course on game theory that explored how individual state actors’ decisions influenced each other’s decisions and outcomes in trade, conflict, and diplomacy. The teacher used the continuing war between North and South Korea as a case study, demonstrating the unique circumstances for escalation or de-escalation depending upon how the important thing actors made decisions along the way in which.
“I saw for the primary time how quantitative methods could possibly be applied to diplomacy and political economy,” Park says — and he knew that his next step was going to be graduate work in the US. He began a joint MA and PhD program in political science at Princeton University the next 12 months, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.
Park’s 2025 dissertation examined the worldwide governance of mental property rights — and it was timely. He began his PhD program in 2018, “the purpose at which the U.S. and China trade war had just begun.” Throughout the pandemic, he was moved by the continuing debates regarding vaccine inequality. “I noticed then that mental property was at the middle of those global economic challenges.” With little political science research on the subject, he “got down to create a systemic framework” to check it.
Concurrently, he served as a teaching assistant in undergraduate courses in statistical evaluation and realized that he deeply enjoyed the experience of teaching and interacting with students. It was a really different experience from his own college years.
“In South Korea, it’s common for the training environment to be one through which the professor just delivers lectures, but I discovered that in the US’ higher education system, the classroom is really interactive. I learned something from each of my students.” Soon, Park was certain that he not only wanted to construct a profession in academic research, but in addition a future that heavily incorporated teaching and mentoring students.
Before graduating, he spent a 12 months at Georgetown University as a predoctoral fellow affiliated with the Mortara Center for International Studies. This experience enabled him to explore the policy implications of his research and have interaction with policymakers in Washington — skills he’ll draw on in his latest position.
Lasting lessons from CIS
Park recently accepted a position as assistant professor on the National University of Singapore. Starting fall 2026, he will likely be teaching graduate students affiliated with the varsity of public policy — most of whom can have profession experience as practitioners in the general public or private sectors.
He’ll take many lessons from MIT to his latest academic home, he says. “Based on what I learned in the US, I’ll make the training environment within the graduate courses I teach way more interactive and collaborative.”
At CIS, Mihaela Papa, director of research and principal research scientist, and Evan Lieberman, the middle’s director and professor of political science, connected Park to associated faculty whose research interests were related along with his own. “Meeting with all of those scholars whose research relates in some method to mental property rights made me take into consideration how my very own interests can expand to other topics,” Park explains.
But the most important takeaway of all is that he learned tips on how to share his own research with scholars who study unfamiliar topics, to exchange ideas and discover commonality. “I’ll never stop using the communication skills that I came at MIT,” Park says.
