Jungwoo Chun

Jungwoo Chun, a graduate of the doctoral program at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Policy and Planning. His dissertation involved investigating clusters of intermediaries that support community ownership of solar energy projects in the United States. He has extensive research, teaching, and professional experience related to various aspects of climate change and sustainability with a particular focus on climate justice and resilience.

At MIT DUSP, he has led and supervised a group of UROPs conducting exploratory research on the sources of opposition to utility-scale renewable energy projects and made several presentations to the wider MIT audience in Cambridge, MA on the findings, notably at the MIT Energy Night 2021 and the MIT Energy and Climate Hack Research Symposium 2021. He has previously directed the MIT Cybersecurity Clinic and led the client recruitment process and oversaw student team engagement with the client communities seeking to combat the growing cybersecurity threats they face. The Clinic (11.074/11.274) has been so successful that now there is a Consortium of University-based Cybersecurity Clinics modeled on the MIT Clinic (https://cybersecurityclinics.org/). He was a graduate instructor for a number of courses in DUSP including 11.601 Introduction to Environmental Policy and Planning, 11.255 Negotiation and Dispute Resolution in the Public Sector, and was a co-instructor of 11.382 Water Diplomacy: The Science, Policy, and Politics of Managing Shared Resources. He continues to brainstorm ways to improve pedagogical strategies and techniques, including ways of incorporating online learning tools, and combining them with in-person instruction.  For a number of years, he has been a content developer and graduate instructor for online courses offered by MIT xPRO and edX/MITx, that have attracted more than 10,000 learners world-wide. 

Outside of MIT, he offers voluntary service to a group of practitioners representing 20+ leading organizations that collectively advance a broad vision of energy democracy across the US.  He aims to support a campaign calling for a more democratized energy system that can address community needs for safe, reliable, resilient, sustainable, and equitable energy. He has also co-organized a multi-year Summer School on Urban Resilience with the help of colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark, IUAV University of Venice, and Imperial College London. During its first iteration (September 5-21, 2019) in Copenhagen, he and his colleagues invited more than 30 practitioners, policymakers, and researchers from 20 countries.  He is an active reviewer for journals like Sustainable Development, Sustainability, and Transport Policy, and a former writing fellow at Sense and Sustainability at Harvard University.