Dr. Eun Joo Kwon

Eun Joo Kwon is an applied public policy researcher whose work spans education policy, public finance, health and well-being, and programme evaluation.

She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Management and Policy from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, and earned her Master of Public Policy and her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at Seoul National University.

Her dissertation examines how charter school policies affect the financial condition of school districts, the true interest costs they borrow at, and student achievement. Earlier, at Seoul National University's Research Center for Aging Society and Social Capital, she studied self-reported health and well-being among older adults, including suicidal ideation, self-neglect, and aging anxiety.

She has published six peer-reviewed papers, among them one in Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and has presented at conferences in the United States, Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom. At Georgia State she worked with the Public Budgeting Lab and with the Accountability and Reform Research Consortium.

Her honours include the merit-based Dean's Fellowship, funded by the Coca-Cola Foundation, held from 2019 to 2022, and the ICPSR Summer Program Scholarship at the University of Michigan in 2023.

Beyond research, she has volunteered at animal centres in Seoul and worked as a programme instructor at a winter camp for North Korean refugee adolescents — the work that draws her to APYCF's community-led programmes with children, families, and animal welfare. She joins the Institute to bring her research training to that work, and to make the recommendations that come out of it rigorous enough to be useful to the communities they are about.