Pyung Kim

(Name pronunciation: P-young Kim)

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, beginning in January 2026. I am committed to translating place-based social challenges into theoretical frameworks that can be rigorously evaluated with empirical data.

My research lies at the intersection of geography, public policy, and data science. My work has three primary threads:

  1. Neighborhood Effects: Examining how neighborhood environments shape health and socioeconomic outcomes.
  2. AI for Health & Policy: Applying machine learning to forecast emerging health risks and design proactive policy interventions.
  3. Spatial Causal Inference: Developing spatial analytic methods to understand why policy impacts vary across places.

As a PI and GIS specialist, I have contributed to numerous grant-funded projects supported by U.S. federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration (SSA), the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), and the National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER), and the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

Biography

Before joining UCSB, Pyung Kim served as a Graduate Researcher with the Spatial Health AI Research Partnership (SHARP) at the University of Texas at Dallas (2024-2025). He also taught machine learning and spatial statistics courses at the Korea Social Science Data Archive (KOSSDA) at Seoul National University (2023-2025). In addition, he previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Korea Institute of Public Administration (KIPA), a national policy think tank under the National Research Council for Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences (2020).

He earned his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Economy and his M.S. in Geospatial Information Science from the University of Texas at Dallas (2025), where he was admitted with the program’s highest honor, the Brian J.L. Berry Scholarship. He also holds an M.A. in Public Administration from Yonsei University (2020), supported by the Brain Korea 21 PLUS Scholarship, and a B.A. in Public Administration from Ajou University (2018), funded by Korea’s National Excellence Scholarship. During his undergraduate studies, he also studied as an exchange student at the Julius-Maximilian University of Wuerzburg in Germany (2016-2017).

Research Interests

  • Neighborhood Effects
  • Human and Health Geography
  • Environment, Health, and Disability
  • Spatial Data Science and AI for Public Policy
  • Spatial Causal Inference and Policy Evaluation

Contact Me

pyung.kim@utdallas.edu
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