Soomin Oh joined IDD in 2021 as a postdoctoral research fellow for the Development Engagement Lab. Prior to joining IDD, she completed her PhD at Duke University in 2021, where she wrote a dissertation on the logic of subnational allocation of public goods in the developing world.
For DEL, Soomin designs and analyses surveys to understand public attitudes towards international aid in the UK, US, Germany and France, and communicates the findings with the development sector.
More broadly, Soomin’s research is focused on understanding the logic of public goods allocation, both domestic and international. Her current research projects look at (1) the interaction between electoral incentives and service characteristics to determine what, where and how public goods are provided, and (2) how colonial legacies impact the patterns of public goods allocation in the postcolonial countries.
Soomin has been a part of impact evaluations for the USAID governance project in the West Bank (2018), Duke Energy Initiative project in Nepal (2019), and the World Bank project in Central Asia (2020), where she designed the surveys for impact evaluation, trained and monitored the survey implementation, and analysed the data for reports on the impact evaluations.