Soo-yong Byun, Ph.D.

Soo-yong Byun is a professor of Education (Educational Theory and Policy), Demography, and Asian Studies with a joint appointment with the Social Science Research Institute as a co-funded faculty at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a faculty member of Penn State's Comparative and International Education Program and a non-residential visiting professor at Ewha Womans University's Department of Education.  

Before joining Penn State in 2012, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Research Center on Rural Education Support, which was housed within the Center for Developmental Science in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  from 2008 to 2011. He also served as a research associate and survey/psychometric specialist for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)'s Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) at the College of Education at Michigan State University from 2007 to 2008. 

Dr. Byun earned his Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Administration, with a focus on Comparative and International Development Education track, from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities in 2007. In 2017, he was named one of 17 rising alumni by the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development. He was also honored with the 2021 Penn State's College of Education Senior Outstanding Research Award. He served as the president of the Korean American Educational Researchers Association (KAERA) for 2017-18 and as a visiting scholar at Seoul National University's Department of Education for 2018-19. 

His scholarly interests encompass sociology of education, international comparative education, rural education, and educational policy analysis and program evaluation. His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including American Educational Research Journal, Comparative Education Review, and Sociology of Education. Furthermore, he has contributed to multiple editorial and advisory boards, including American Educational Research Journal, American Journal of Education, and Sociology of Education.

Email: szb14@psu.edu