About

The Department of Political Science extends a very warm welcome to Hyein Ko, who will be joining us as an assistant professor in January 2026. In the meantime, she’ll be affiliated with the department as a non-resident scholar.

Dr. Ko is a political scientist and computational social scientist who conducts research in the exciting new area of visual politics. Her studies develop and use AI and ML methods (including computer vision and text analysis) to assess how images contain subtle information and thereby influence politics. At the intersection of artificial intelligence, visual communication, elite behavior, and public opinion, Ko’s research defies disciplinary boundaries and spans a range of topics, including media framing of protests, visual and verbal depiction of political leaders, authoritarian elite networks, and the use and evaluation of AI-generated data in social science research. In addition to her role as a professor in the Department of Political Science, Dr. Ko will be joining a cluster of new CWRU faculty with expertise in AI.

From 2023 to 2025, Dr. Ko was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she led a multi-disciplinary group of scholars and graduate students as part of the Minerva Research Initiative on elites in authoritarian regimes. She received her PhD from the University of Iowa, and her MA and BA from Ewha Womans University. More information on Ko and her resaearch is available on her website.