Faculty profile: Soo-yong Byun
Title: Associate Professor of Education (Educational Theory and Policy)
Department: Education Policy Studies
Office address: 302F Rackley Building
Directory entry: https://ed.psu.edu/directory/szb14
Byun is currently serving as the professor-in-charge of Penn State's Comparative and International Education Program. He is affiliated with the Center on Rural Education and Communities as a research associate, with the Center for Evaluation and Educational Policy Analysis as a senior researcher and with the Population Research Institute as a research affiliate at Penn State.
Prior to coming to Penn State in 2012, Byun worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Research Center on Rural Education Support housed within the Center for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008-11), and as a research associate and survey/psychometric specialist for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)'s Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) in the College of Education at Michigan State University (2007-08). He received his doctorate in educational policy and administration from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities in 2007. He was the president of the Korean American Educational Researchers Association (KAERA) for 2017-18, and served as a visiting scholar at Seoul National University for 2018-19 (sabbatical leave).
Byun’s scholarly interests include sociology of education, international comparative education, rural education, and educational policy analysis and program evaluation. His articles have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including American Educational Research Journal, Comparative Education Review and Sociology of Education. He has served on multiple editorial and advisory boards, including American Educational Research Journal, American Journal of Education, Research in the Sociology of Education and Sociology of Education. He is currently serving as an associate editor for American Educational Research Journal.