Justin is a PhD graduate of Yale, having majored in cell biology. He is also a graduate of the Yale Teaching Center, a teaching fellow in the American National Academy of Sciences, and the former associate director of the Tan School of Innovation at Fudan University. Justin has served in a wide variety of academic capacities, including as the founding director of the Dongseo Scientific Teaching Center, the director of undergraduate studies, and chair (HoD) of the Global Biotechnology department at Dongseo University in South Korea. Justin has significant experience in industry, having founded and operated four companies: a software company focusing on the development of educational tools, an education consultancy, a business consultancy, and a Korean art company. He also has extensive media and outreach experience, having appeared on a wide range of news outlets, including BBC World TV, the Wall Street Journal Online, Korea Herald, Korea Times, and The Diplomat.

Justin’s research interests are wide and varying. The largest stream of ongoing work involves behavioral studies: these projects focus on understanding how people in specific contexts perceive and make decisions, especially during learning and when involving science conceptualizations for topics like climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). A second stream of work involves corpus analysis, the computational evaluation of large text databases (e.g. thousands of newspaper articles or tens of thousands of message posts): these projects focus on developing new methods to quantify the ways in which specific science terms are being presented in popular and professional written media. A third stream of work involves big data analysis and bioinformatics: these projects focus on using advanced statistical methods and machine learning to characterize complex phenomena such as resource distribution within families and mRNA expression differences in aging populations. A fourth stream of work involves software development: these projects focus on developing new tools for educational purposes and new large language model (LLM) algorithms for sorting and analyzing text-based media.

Justin is always on the lookout for new project ideas or highly motivated students to join the research group. If you are the latter or interested in developing an idea of your own, please do not hesitate to book an appointment.

Justin has extensive teaching experience that runs the gamut of STEM subjects. He has taught over sixty different kinds of modules, including: general biology, molecular biology, cellular biology, genetics, general chemistry, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, physics, biophysics, research skills, statistics, current events in science, biotechnology, biomedical sciences, physiology, economics, business applications of science, English for science, and Korean. His noted pedagogical specialties are active learning, scientific teaching (the treatment of learning as a research subject), flipped learning, CUREs (course-based undergraduate research experiences), POGIL (process-oriented guided inquiry learning), scaffolded problem-based learning, and scaffolded project-based learning. He is currently the module leader for SCI002 (Scientific Principles and Methods), SCI003 (Scientific Communication and Integrity), BIO109 (Introduction to Evolution and Genetics), and SCI301 (Critical Thinking and Applied Skills in Science Research) while also being an instructor in BIO201 (Genome Expression and Maintenance).