Hye-jeong Seo

Hye-jeong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban & Environmental Design & Planning track. She is a Ph.D. fellow in the Interfaces of Global Change, one of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Programs at Virginia Tech. She is currently a graduate research assistant at the Virginia Tech Center for Economic and Community Engagement. She is interested in the role of informational governance in environmental performance, economic development, and community engagement. Her dissertation examines how generation, processing, and transmission of environmental information spur communication and action from social actors and affect institutional changes. Her graduate assistant research work assists communities in making data-driven decisions and provides quantitative and qualitative analysis regarding economic development, community engagement, and technology adoption.

Hye-jeong finished her B.S. in Urban Engineering from Pusan National University in 2011, graduating on the President’s list and with Summa Cum Laude honors. She studied environmental and hazard mitigation planning at the same university and received her M.S. in 2013. After graduation, she worked at the Korea Environment Institute for a few years, researching participatory methods for climate change adaptation planning, developing climate change risk assessment tools, and facilitating participatory processes for community climate change adaptation.

Research Interests

• Informational governance
• Data-driven community engagement
• Information and communication strategies
• Science-policy interfaces