Developing international trade research and community outreach | MIT News

The sense of support and community was palpable when Sojun Park, a fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), delivered a recent presentation on the Global Diffusion of AI Technologies and Its Political Drivers. The event, part of the CIS Global Research and Policy Seminar, filled the venue with an audience from across MIT.

“My work is directly connected to what CIS faculty have done before in international trade and security,” Park said afterward. “If I hadn’t gotten a postdoctoral fellowship and come to MIT, I wouldn’t have been able to think about the security implications of my intellectual property research. I’m very inspired by these scholars.”

Park’s time at CIS has been foundational and transformative, giving him a scholarly home that has shaped his research and helped expand his intellectual horizons.

Pursuing interdisciplinary research and communication

Before pursuing a tenure-track position, Park focused on conducting research at MIT. When he came across a public posting about the CIS Postdoctoral Associate Program, he jumped at the chance and applied.

“My research is interdisciplinary, and I knew that I could really benefit from the interdisciplinary environment at MIT, and especially at CIS, where the faculty is not only from political science, but also connected to the Department of Economics and MIT Sloan. [School of Management],” he says.

Park is excited to receive a paid fellowship, which provides a year of study at MIT and dedicated office space at CIS. At MIT, he is free to spend his time on his research, and has found the value of pursuing topics of interest to the CIS community – whether it’s AI or global governance. He has been widely published on the track, including two articles in Review of International Organizations as well as Review of International Political Economy.

He continued to work on his forthcoming book, “From Privilege to Prosperity: Knowledge Diffusion and Global Intellectual Property Management,” which examines how technology can be legally transferred across borders. “By ‘officially,’ I am asking under what conditions can firms volunteer to share their technology? I like institutions and centers that allow large businesses to share their technology with small businesses based in the developing world that may not have the ability to bring their technology,” he explained.

During the spring semester of 2026, he is working with the institution’s Undergraduate Fellows Program. This program allows postdocs to work on their research projects with students working under MIT. Park is working with two other CIS graduate students to create a new data set that examines international trade in green technologies. This opportunity reconnects Park to his early educational experiences in South Korea that put him on the path to MIT.

Road to MIT

“South Korean students are trained to solve problems,” explained Park, who was born and raised in Seoul. The country’s rigorous college entrance exams reward those who can answer a large number of questions quickly and accurately in a limited amount of time.

While writing a test in high school, Park stumbled upon a question that he could not answer, no matter how much time he spent concentrating on it. He gave the test, but he took the problem home and spent hours puzzled over it – he couldn’t stop it. “When I look back, I see this as the moment I made the decision that I want to be an academic,” said Park.

While majoring in international studies and economics (math) at Korea University, he had the opportunity to participate in a semester-long exchange program at the University of Texas at Austin. There, Park enrolled in a political science course in game theory that examined how the decisions of individual state actors influence each other’s choices and outcomes in trade, conflict, and communication. The teacher used the ongoing war between North and South Korea as an example, showing different situations of ups and downs depending on how key players made decisions along the way.

“I saw for the first time how quantitative methods can be applied to international relations and political economy,” said Park – and he knew that his next step would be graduate work in the United States. He began a joint MA and PhD program in political science at Princeton University the following year, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.

Park’s 2025 framework explored global governance of intellectual property rights – and it was timely. He started his PhD program in 2018, “the point at which the US-China trade war was just beginning.” During the pandemic, he was moved by ongoing debates about the inequity of vaccination. “I realized at that time that intellectual intelligence is among the challenges of the global economy.” With little political science research on the subject, he “set out to create a systematic framework” to study it.

At the same time, he worked as a teaching assistant in undergraduate courses in statistical analysis and realized that he really enjoyed the experience of teaching and interacting with students. It was a very different experience from his college years.

“In South Korea, it is common for the learning environment to be where the professor has just given lectures, but I found that in the United States higher education setting, the classroom is truly collaborative. Soon, Park was convinced that he not only wanted to build a career in academic research, but also a future that involved more teaching and mentoring students.

Before graduating, he spent a year at Georgetown University as a fellow at the Mortara Center for International Studies. This experience helped him explore the policy implications of his research and interact with policymakers in Washington – skills he will use in his new role.

Permanent lessons from CIS

Park recently accepted a position as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. Beginning in the fall of 2026, he will be teaching graduate students affiliated with the school of public policy – many of whom will have academic work experience in the public or private sector.

He will take many courses at MIT and go to his new academic home, he says. “Based on what I learned in the United States, I will make the learning environment in the graduate courses I teach more interactive and collaborative.”

At CIS, Mihaela Papa, director of research and chief research scientist, and Evan Lieberman, director of the center and professor of political science, connected Park with a faculty whose research related to his. “Meeting all these experts whose research is somehow related to intellectual property rights made me think about how my interests can expand to other topics,” explained Park.

But most of all, he learned how to share his research with academics studying unfamiliar topics, exchanging ideas and finding common ground. “I will never stop using the communication skills I learned here at MIT,” Park said.