About Leo
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I am a joint Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University. My advisor is Gordon Kingsley.
My research asks how the capacity to govern is reshaped when organizations restructure their relationships with external actors. I identify and answer this question through direct engagement with the organizational challenges governments face, first in South Korea, where I worked on policy evaluation and organizational reform for multiple government agencies, and now in the United States, where my doctoral research is embedded in state DOTs' infrastructure delivery programs.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My dissertation shows that contract structure in infrastructure delivery is not merely a procurement variable but a governance architecture that simultaneously structures the inter-organizational relationship and reorganizes the internal processes through which the agency fulfills its public functions.
I also study social enterprise ecosystems, where I examine how competing institutional logics, market versus community, produce systematically different cluster profiles and levels of political durability. In science and technology policy, I analyze how transformative innovation policy faces a legitimacy-durability paradox as it moves from closed expert networks to broader stakeholder engagement. In policing, I investigate whether philanthropic funding of police departments enhances public value or distorts it by shifting organizational behavior.
My research draws on network analysis, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, comparative case study, and large-N panel data analysis. I have conducted over 100 interviews across the U.S. and South Korea and analyzed thousands of pages of project documents and regulatory correspondence.
BACKGROUND
My work has been supported by grants and scholarships from the APPAM Entrepreneurship Policy Fellowship (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation), Mercatus Center Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship, GSU AYSPS Andrew Young Fellowship, National Research Foundation of Korea, Yonsei Center for Social Innovation, and Yonsei University.
Before my doctoral studies, I worked at a South Korean social tech start-up (featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review), served as a researcher for multiple Korean government agencies including the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, Korea Forest Service, Science and Technology Policy Institute, and National Center for Mental Health, and was invited as a Young Academic for the 2018 P4G Summit in Copenhagen. These experiences grounded my interest in how organizational and institutional design shapes policy capacity, the question that now anchors my research.
I hold an M.A. in Public Administration and a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Policy, both from Yonsei University.
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