Irene Kyoung is currently a Research Associate for the Korea Program at APARC. Irene supports research projects regarding Korean politics and society, Nationalism and Racism in Asia, and the ongoing Talent Flows project. Previously, she worked as the Policy Associate at The Korea Society. Irene received a Master of Arts degree in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations from Columbia University and graduated with honors in Government and Legal Studies from Bowdoin College. Her hobbies include writing, playing the piano, and traveling. She is also fluent in Korean.

Aidan Milliff joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as the 2022-2023 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia. 

Milliff obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, and a 2021-2022 USIP/Minerva Peace and Security Scholar. Aidan’s research combines computational social science and qualitative tools to answer questions about the cognitive, emotional, and social forces that shape political violence, migration, post-violence politics, and the politics of South Asia. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and proceedings including AAAI, Journal of Peace Research, Political Behavior, as well as popular outlets including the Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog, War on the Rocks, and India’s Hindustan Times. Before MIT, Aidan was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a BA in political science and MA in international relations from the University of Chicago. He was born and raised in Colorado.

Aidan’s dissertation asks: in complex political violence scenarios, like inter-communal conflict in South Asia, what determines the strategies that people pursue to keep themselves safe? Aidan develops a political psychology theory, situational appraisal theory, which focuses on variation in individual interpretations of violent environments to explain civilian behavior. The dissertation first uses situational appraisal theory to explain the behavior of Indian Sikhs who encountered violence in rural insurgency and urban pogroms during the 1980s. Pairing original interviews with a novel method for applying multilingual text classification algorithms and automated video-analysis tools to analyze an archive of hundreds of oral history videos, the project shows that situational appraisals of control and predictability explain substantial variation in individuals’ choice of survival strategies when confronting violence.  The dissertation then demonstrates the generalizability of situational appraisal theory to international security domains, using a large survey experiment to show that control and predictability framing influences foreign policy preferences about hypothetical U.S.–China military confrontation.

At APARC, Aidan transformed his dissertation project into a book manuscript, and extend his ongoing research on decision-making, political violence, and Indian politics.

Jianan Yang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as the 2022-2023 Developing Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow. She recently obtained her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California San Diego. She holds B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from the Renmin University of China. Her research lies in the intersection of development and health economics and revolves around what drives the sub-optimal healthcare-seeking behaviors in developing countries and how they can be improved by leveraging price or non-price mechanisms.

Yang views health as a fundamental part of human development. People in developing countries usually face additional barriers to accessing healthcare resources because of underqualified providers on the one side, lower income levels, insufficient insurance coverages, and a lack of information on the other side. Because markets in healthcare settings are usually characterized by imperfect competition and government regulations, Yang thinks it is important to evaluate the policies’ impacts on various aspects of the healthcare system. Through understanding the underlying constraints, we can think about how the policy can be designed more efficiently.

Yang’s dissertation studied how patients’ chronic condition drug utilization responds to price reductions in China. By documenting a larger increase in utilization and a meaningful reduction in underuse among the uninsured, the study suggests that the price elasticities would be higher in developing countries and there will be larger welfare benefits from such price reductions resulting from squeezing out the price markups of the pharmaceutical companies due to market power. The finding suggests that cost is a barrier to both drug take-up and adherence, especially among the lower-income population who meanwhile are more likely to not have insurance coverage.

At APARC, Yang further accessed the underlying factors affecting people’s healthcare-seeking behaviors including the role of cost, information, and behavioral bias. She also extended her research agenda to the other sectors of the healthcare system. 

Kyuri Park joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as a postdoctoral fellow during the 2022-2023 academic year. Kyuri was also a non-resident fellow of the US-Korea NextGen Scholars Program (2022-2024), an initiative by CSIS Korea Chair and USC Korean Studies Institute. 

Her research lies primarily in international security and cooperation, with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific. Kyuri is particularly interested in examining the variations in the pattern of security cooperation between great powers and secondary states in the Asia-Pacific (1970-present) and drawing out the implications for regional order, stability, and the US grand strategy. By shedding light on joint military exercises in the region, during her time at Shorenstein APARC, Kyuri worked on her book project which explores how East Asian secondary states are responding to the rise of China, and why they are responding the way they are.  

Kyuri’s work on South Korea’s middle power diplomacy has appeared in International Politics. Previously, Kyuri was a US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at the USC Korean Studies Institute. She also served as a co-contributing author of ‘Korea-Japan relations’ in Comparative Connections published by Pacific Forum.  

Kyuri received her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC), M.A. in Asian Studies at Georgetown University, and B.A. in International Studies at Ewha Womans University. 

Lieutenant Colonel Faith Posey joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar for the 2022-2023 academic year. Lt. Col. Posey currently serves in the United States Air Force. While at APARC, she conducted research regarding security and international relations issues in the Asia-Pacific.

Dr. Ankhbayar Begz joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar for the fall and winter quarter of the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Begz currently serves as researcher at Mongolian University of Science and Technology's Open Education Center. While at APARC, he conducted research regarding democracy, women’s political participation, higher education, and gender equality issues in Mongolia and Asia.