Woojin Jung

Researcher of Poverty & Development

Current research projects in the Republic of the Congo and Zambia involve partners from international organizations, government agencies, and the private sector. Dr. Jung leads an interdisciplinary research team that represents social scientists and computer/data scientists from countries around the globe. Her latest journal article, "Using Artificial Intelligence/machine learning to evaluate the distribution of community development aid across Myanmar," written by Dr. Woojin Jung, Dr. Saeed Ghadimi, Dr. Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis, and Andrew H. Kim, was recently published in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. Updates on Dr. Jung's recent works can be found on her blog page. Her work has also been featured in 'Focus on Faculty' on Rutgers University's Office of Research website and social media outletsor social media accounts:

Global Poverty & Aid

Woojin Jung is an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of global poverty, social welfare policy, and data science. She develops multimodal, high-resolution models to predict poverty, food insecurity, and hazard vulnerability, equipping development organizations to more effectively target social transfers in data-sparse regions. Drawing on satellite imagery, social media, geographic attributes, her work produces granular maps that improve needs assessment in some of the world's least-studied settings.

Her scholarship appears in leading interdisciplinary journals and has been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (Excellent Award), the Society for Social Work and Research (Outstanding Dissertation Award) and Rutgers University (Innovation Award). Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Microsoft, and the Korea International Cooperation Agency. She presents regularly at major international conferences and universities worldwide.

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