People - MERG LAB
People
Director
Dongyoung Sohn (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is a Professor in the Department of Media & Communication at Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea, where he has been a faculty member since 2011. Prior to joining Hanyang University, he held faculty positions at The Ohio State University in Columbus and the University of South Florida in Tampa, USA. He has also served as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria, and as a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, UK. He is currently an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Computational Social Sciences (C2S2) at Hanyang University. His research focuses on the ecology of networked media, examining how individuals perceive, interpret, and adapt to their local social environments within digitally networked communication systems. Using computational and simulation-based approaches, his work investigates how micro-level interactions among individuals give rise to emergent macro-level phenomena, including information diffusion, public opinion dynamics, trust formation, and norm evolution.
Faculty Affiliate
Jayeon Lee (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is an associate professor in the Department of Media & Communication, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Before joining HYU, she was an associate professor at Gachon University, Korea. Her research programs center on the issues related to social media and changing media environments — how individuals utilize, interpret, and share various textual and audiovisual information available on digital platforms in forming perceptions and attitudes, and making decisions, and how characteristics of digital environments influence the processes.
Jinwoo Lucian Park (Ph.D., Hanyang University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Media & Communication, Hanyang Universiry, Seoul, Korea. Before joining HYU, he worked as an adjunct professor at Kyunghee University, Seoul, Korea and taught at Sungshin Women’s University, Dankook University, and Kangwon National University in Korea. His research programs focus on the understanding of how public opinion is formed and changes in the networked communication environment like social media, especially from the public relations (PR) perspective.
External Faculty
Chul-joo "CJ" Lee (Ph.D., The University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor and graduate director in the Department of Communication at Seoul National University and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lee’s research focuses on the interplay between communication and social determinants of health. Lee is an Associate Editor for Journal of Communication. Additionally, he currently serves or has served on the editorial boards of some of the top outlets of the fields of communication and public health.
Jin-Ho Choi (Ph.D., Hanyang University) is currently a senior researcher at the Korea Press Foundation. He was formerly a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Computational Social Sciences (C2S2), Hanyang University-Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on explaining the changes in journalism, public opinion, and political communication in the digital environment using computational methods.
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Sung In Choi (Ph.D., Seoul National University) is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at MERG Lab and the Center for Computational Social Sciences (C2S2), Hanyang University-Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses on the social implications of digital media and platform usage, as well as finding innovative research methods for studying them.
Graduate Research Assistant
Sujin Yoon (M.A., Arizona State University, M.A., Hanyang University) is currently a doctoral student at MERG Lab and serves as a research assistant jointly for the Center for Computational Social Sciences (C2S2), Hanyang University-Seoul, Korea. Her research interests are in exploring how group dynamics affect the patterns of public opinion in social media and applying computational methods to reinterpreting communication theories.
Yoon-Jung Kim (B.S., Fu Jen Catholic University) is currently a master's student in the Department of Media & Communication and research assistant at MERG Lab and the Center for Computational Social Sciences (C2S2), Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Her research interests include media psychology, interpersonal communication, and advertising effectiveness.
