Yuree Noh: Bridging People’s Welfare in Government and Society

Yuree Noh is a Research Fellow with the Middle East Initiative

Yuree Noh moved to the United States from Seoul, Korea to further her education. Her plan was to then return to Korea to become a policymaker who would build bridges between Korea and the Middle East.

Noh’s interest in the Middle East came from her longtime fascination with the Arabic language and with pyramids. This interest led her to spend a semester abroad at American University in Cairo during her undergraduate years at Washington University.

Today, in the U.S. as a Research Fellow with the Middle East Initiative, Noh co-leads the Kuwait Public Policy Opinion Project with Professor Tarek Masoud. They have given it the acronym K-PPOP, which she finds comical because she is Korean. Through surveys, Noh and Masoud gather opinions of Kuwaitis on a range of issues. Their first wave of surveys asked what would induce Kuwaitis to support taxes and in what situations they would give up their online privacy.

“This research is relevant not just for authoritarian countries in the Gulf, but also for countries like the U.S. currently having this debate,” she says. “We are hoping to make a contribution both theoretically and empirically by gathering data not available anywhere else.” 

In addition to the Kuwait project, Noh is researching election practices in non-democracies and the use of gender quotas. She is also writing a book that examines international reputation and domestic social cohesion as two factors affecting the levels of election rigging.

Noh is grateful to be in an environment where she can engage in active research. “Cambridge is the best place in the world to do that,” she says, “especially because Middle East political science is such a niche area.”

When asked about her future, Noh says that she can see herself as a policymaker in Korea. She acknowledges, however, that she is very content with where she is at the moment.