Advancing international trade research and finding community

Source: MIT News - AI

The sense of support and community was palpable when Sojun Park, a postdoc 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 audience members from across MIT.

“My work is directly connected to what CIS faculty have previously done on international trade and security,” Park said afterwards. “If I hadn’t received a postdoctoral fellowship and come to MIT, I wouldn’t have been able to think through the security implications of my intellectual‑property research. I’ve been tremendously motivated by these scholars.”

Park’s time at CIS has been both grounding and transformative, offering him a scholarly home that has shaped his research and helped broaden his intellectual horizons.

Pursuing interdisciplinary research and connections

Before pursuing a tenure‑track position, Park set his sights on conducting research at MIT. When he came across a public posting about the CIS Postdoctoral Associate Program, he took a chance and applied.

“My own research is interdisciplinary, and I knew that I could really benefit from the interdisciplinary environment at MIT, and specifically at CIS, where faculty are coming not only from political science, but also affiliated with the Department of Economics and MIT Sloan School of Management, ” he says.

Park was thrilled to receive the paid fellowship, which offers an academic year at MIT and dedicated office space at CIS. At MIT, he is free to use his time toward his own research and has found value in pursuing topics that are of interest to the CIS community—whether it’s AI or global governance. He’s published prolifically along the way, including two articles in the Review of International Organizations and the Review of International Political Economy.

He’s also continued work on his forthcoming book, “From Privilege to Prosperity: Knowledge Diffusion and the Global Governance of Intellectual Property,” which examines how technologies can be transferred legitimately across borders.

“By ‘legitimately,’ I am asking under what circumstances firms would volunteer to share their technologies. I’m interested in institutions and institutional environments that allow large businesses to share their technologies with smaller businesses based in the developing world that may not possess the ability to create their own technologies,” he explains.

During the spring 2026 semester, he is collaborating with the center’s Undergraduate Fellows Program. This program enables postdocs to work on research projects with MIT undergraduates. Park is working with two CIS undergraduate fellows to develop a new dataset examining international trade in green technologies. This opportunity reconnects Park to his early academic experiences in South Korea that set him on the path to MIT.

Path to MIT

“Students in South Korea are trained to be problem‑solvers,” explains Park, who was born and raised in Seoul. The country’s rigorous college‑entrance exams reward those who can answer the most questions quickly and accurately in a limited amount of time.

While taking a test in high school, Park stumbled over a question he couldn’t answer, no matter how long he concentrated. He handed in the exam, but took the problem home and spent hours puzzling over it—he just couldn’t let it go. “In hindsight, I see this as the moment I decided that I wanted to become a scholar,” Park says.

Majoring in international studies and economics (statistics) at Korea University, he participated in a semester‑long exchange program at the University of Texas at Austin. There, he enrolled in a political‑science course on game theory that explored how individual state actors’ decisions influenced one another’s choices and outcomes in trade, conflict, and diplomacy. The instructor used the ongoing war between North and South Korea as a case study, demonstrating the unique circumstances for escalation or de‑escalation depending on how key actors made choices.

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

Park’s 2025 dissertation examined the global governance of intellectual‑property rights—and it was timely. He began his PhD program in 2018, “the point at which the U.S.‑China trade war had just begun.” During the pandemic, he was moved by the ongoing debates regarding vaccine inequality. “I realized then that intellectual property was at the center of these global economic challenges.” With little political‑science research on the topic, he “set out to create a systemic framework” to study it.

Simultaneously, he served as a teaching assistant in undergraduate courses in statistical analysis and discovered a deep enjoyment in teaching and interacting with students. It was a very different experience from his own college years.

“In South Korea, it’s common for the learning environment to be one in which the professor just delivers lectures, but I found that in the United States’ higher‑education system, the classroom is truly interactive. I learned something from each of my students.”

Soon, Park was certain that he not only wanted to build a career in academic research, but also a future that heavily incorporated teaching.

Lasting lessons from CIS

Park recently accepted a position as assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. Beginning fall 2026, he will be teaching graduate students affiliated with the School of Public Policy — most of whom will have career experience as practitioners in the public or private sectors.

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

At CIS, Mihaela Papa, director of research and principal research scientist, and Evan Lieberman, the center’s director and professor of political science, connected Park to associated faculty whose research interests were related to his own. “Meeting with all of these scholars whose research relates in some way to intellectual property rights made me think about how my own interests can expand to other topics,” Park explains.

But the biggest takeaway of all is that he learned how to share his own research with scholars who study unfamiliar topics, to exchange ideas and discover commonality. “I’ll never stop using the communication skills that I got here at MIT,” Park says.

ng and mentoring students.