Heonuk Ha

Heonuk Ha is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research centers on AI governance, public sector AI adoption, and the societal impacts of AI across global and comparative contexts. He examines how political institutions and bureaucratic capacity shape national AI strategies, ethical frameworks, and regulatory approaches. He has also conducted cross-national analyses comparing AI policies and indices to identify the underlying dimensions of national AI governance capacity.

In the U.S. context, his work investigates the political, institutional, and public drivers of AI policy adoption at the federal, state, and local levels. His projects include analyses of congressional AI legislation, state-level policy diffusion, and municipal AI implementation, incorporating original datasets and text analysis of policy documents and public surveys. Drawing on his expertise in fiscal policy, he also explores how federal agencies leverage AI to improve financial management and digital service delivery. His research has been published or is forthcoming in multiple peer-reviewed journals spanning public policy, technology, and governance.