Jiyoung Kim

Jiyoung Kim is an Assistant Professor in the department of political science at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on how climate change affects intergroup relations in the Global South. She is currently working on a book project that examines how climate change-induced economic hardship impacts social fabric in ethnically diverse communities, and explores effective strategies for mitigating these negative effects in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria as her main research site. This work is part of her broader research portfolio, which includes work on public attitudes toward climate-induced migration, building social cohesion in conflict-affected areas, and gender issues. Methodologically, she employs a diverse toolkit including statistical inference, geospatial analysis, surveys, and experiments. She also conducts extensive in-depth fieldwork interviews. She received her PhD in Political Science from UCLA in 2025.