Dr. Changdeok Gim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society at SUNY Korea. Before joining SUNY Korea in 2024, he served as Associate Director of Water UCI at the University of California, Irvine, where he worked on collaborative research projects in water resource governance, climate adaptation, equity and water industry, water quality issues, PFAS, and digitized water management.
He previously worked on projects on mainstreaming climate adaptation, adaptation monitoring and evaluation, and climate adaptation technology law and policy at the Korea Environment Institute and the Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute, engaging in environmental law, infrastructure management, water policy, and regulatory reform.
He received a Ph.D. in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from Arizona State University, where his dissertation focused on institutional management for infrastructure resilience. He also earned an LL.M. in the American Law Program from the University of California, Irvine School of Law, building on earlier graduate training in urban planning and environmental management and undergraduate training in law at Seoul National University.
His academic and professional background reflects a sustained interdisciplinary trajectory across environmental policy, science and technology studies, resilience studies, AI governance, and legal-institutional analysis.
TEACHING
Dr. Gim’s teaching emphasizes interdisciplinary decision-making, sociotechnical systems thinking, and real-world applications in environmental policy and infrastructure management. He encourages students to analyze environmental and technological issues not as isolated technical problems, but as institutional and societal challenges shaped by law, governance, risk, and public values. His courses are designed to help students develop analytical, practical, and policy-relevant skills for addressing sustainability and resilience challenges in complex systems.
Courses he has taught include:
EST 194 Decision Making
EST 393 Project Management
EST 475 Undergraduate Teaching Practicum,
EST 582 Sociotechnical Systems,
EST 599 Special Topics and Research
EST 591 Independent Study
Across these courses, he integrates decision analysis, environmental justice, institutional governance, and field-based learning to connect classroom concepts with contemporary policy and societal issues.
His research examines how public institutions, legal frameworks, and knowledge systems orient, regulate, and govern socio-eco-technological systems, environmental uncertainty, climate risks, and AI management challenges.
Past and Present Research
Dr. Gim’s research brings together environmental sustainability, climate policy, infrastructure resilience, and sociotechnical systems analysis. His recent publications have examined mistranslation of scientific uncertainties, the mainstreaming of climate adaptation, institutional interdependence and infrastructure resilience, state-level regulation of disinfection byproducts in the United States, and the resilience work of institutions. Together, these studies explore how social, technological, and environmental systems are shaped not only by technical knowledge and policy design, but also by institutional coordination, legal frameworks, and the dynamics of uncertainty in complex systems. This work extends from water quality and adaptation policy to urban resilience, justice approach to urban planning, computational analysis of institutional analysis, safety engineering, environmental justice, and the governance of knowledge in AI management.
He is also developing research on precaution and uncertainty of science and technology, as well as environmental adjudication, alongside projects on climate disasters, water governance, technological systems, and hybrid modeling of infrastructure interdependencies. Through this inter- and transdisciplinary approach, his scholarship aims to connect conceptual debates in sociotechnical governance with practical institutional challenges in public policy and sociotechnical infrastructure.