Mentor: Hyuk-soo Kwon, Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
Yunah Chung is a student in the class of 2028 at the University of Chicago, pursuing a double major in Computer Science and Business Economics with a minor in Cognitive Science. She is passionate about exploring the intersection of technology and environmental sustainability, a focus shaped by her experience working with nonprofits addressing food waste and composting.
This summer, Yunah Chung worked with Professor Kwon on the South Korean used-vehicle project, with a focus on large-scale data completion and integration to enable further policy analysis. Chung built reproducible Python pipelines to clean dealer listings, standardize VIN prefixes, and decode WMI/model-year digits using fuzzy matching and rule-based inference with reliability scores. She linked and de-duplicated records across platforms, fillings VINs for 160k+ listings with high-confidence thresholds, and assembled a policy-timestamped panel. Overall, her work delivered the cleaned datasets and documentation needed for downstream econometric modeling of firms’ responses to policy.
“This internship pushed me from “climate-interested” to “climate-capable.” Building large-scale, reproducible data pipelines for vehicle markets, and aligning them with real policy timelines, gave me hands-on skills to evaluate which incentives accelerate cleaner fleets and reduce emissions. Work on South Korea’s used-car market added a global lens, showing how supply-chain frictions, consumer behavior, and enforcement shape outcomes beyond headline EV subsidies. These skills in data engineering, policy analytics, and clear communication map directly to climate roles in transportation decarbonization, market design, and impact evaluation.”