Heesun YooVisiting Assistant Professor | QTM

• Ph.D., Political Science, Vanderbilt University, 2023
• B.A., Political Science and Economics, Sogang University, South Korea, 2017

Heesun studies the political economy of conflict, with a focus on organized crime. Her research examines how economic factors, such as employment and fluctuations in commodity markets, both legitimate and illegitimate, influence the dynamics of criminal violence. In addition, she studies how criminal actors shape politics and society by exploring multiple geographical contexts.

Heesun's dissertation examines the relationship between illicit economic activities and criminal violence, and its impact on the political arrangement between a government and organized crime groups. She has developed a formal model that explains the logic of the government’s response toward the criminal group and provided the evidence using a case study of Asian organized crime groups. Additionally, she has empirically tested the observable implications derived from the formal model in the Canadian context.

• QTM 150: Intro to Statistical Computing