Welcome to my website. I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 2026, where I also pursued interdisciplinary training in Informatics through the Interdisciplinary Dual Ph.D. Program in Complex Networks and Systems.

I study how global order changes, and I treat that change as three simultaneous dynamics rather than a single story of decline: rupture, as major powers withdraw selectively and reach for unilateral instruments; reconfiguration, as middle powers build flexible alternatives to institutions they can no longer rely on; and reinforcement, as rising powers work through existing liberal frameworks from the inside. Trade is the pivotal network where all three become visible. Methodologically, I treat institutions as relational structures rather than containers, using temporal and multilayer network models, exponential random graph models, hypergraph and bipartite analysis, computational text analysis, and graph neural network modeling.

My dissertation, defended in August 2026, asks why soft-law and non-binding intergovernmental organizations remain effective despite weak enforcement. Using APEC project cosponsorship networks, I show that cooperation is sustained by relational hierarchy rather than formal rules. Smaller economies bandwagon with influential actors—whether influential because of their material attributes or their structural positions in the network—rather than hedge against them. These interactions form transitive brokerage clusters whose organizing logic varies across issue domains.

Related work examines how disaster shocks and anti-trafficking laws reshape human trafficking networks, with a coauthored paper forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly; how China participates in international institutions through its growing role in ISO standard-setting; how states lacking control of material chokepoints substitute regulatory ones through standards leadership in ISO and IEC; and how the global order absorbs or fails to absorb rupture. Before my Ph.D., I worked on APEC policy and capacity-building at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research and served as coordinator for Taiwan’s Bureau of Small and Medium Enterprise to APEC. For more, see my research page. I am also a coauthor of an introductory political science textbook published in Chinese.

I regard teaching as inseparable from research, and the chance to teach was one reason I left several years of policy work for doctoral study. At Indiana University I was Instructor of Record for Politics of Global Governance and Data Fluency, and Associate Instructor for International Organization, Analyzing Politics, and Introduction to Informatics. My classrooms are built around active learning and around a question generative AI has made urgent: as routine execution becomes inexpensive, the distinctly human contribution moves upstream to problem definition and downstream to judgment and communication. See my teaching page and my R Tutorial.

My research and doctoral training have been supported by the Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Ph.D. Dissertation Grant from Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (USD 30,000), the Taiwanese Government Fellowship for Overseas Ph.D. Study from the Ministry of Education (USD 188,000), and the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Interdisciplinary Training in Complex Networks and Systems program at Indiana University (NSF Award #1735095).