Jeongjoon (Joon) Gwon
Prospective PhD student, Fall 2027 — Industrial Engineering / Operations Research
Research interests: urban freight · curb access · integer programming under uncertainty
B.S. candidate, Industrial & Systems Engineering, KAIST
Research Assistant, Urban Freight Lab, University of Washington
Hi, I'm Joon. I'm a senior in Industrial & Systems Engineering at KAIST, spending this year as a researcher at the University of Washington's Urban Freight Lab, and I'm applying to IE/OR PhD programs for Fall 2027. I work on how cities allocate curb space to freight, and on what carriers actually do in response.
What I want to study
A city decides where a truck may legally stop; carriers, drivers, and residents respond to that decision in ways the planning model rarely represents. The loading-zone data describes legal supply, not use — a truck that finds no zone, or a full one, double-parks and leaves no record tied to the zone. I want to build optimization models for curb and access decisions that take that response seriously: integer programs under uncertainty where the people being regulated are part of the model, and where the answer goes back to someone who will act on it.
Current work
At the Urban Freight Lab I built an open dataset of 13,148 commercial vehicle loading zones across 11 U.S. cities, with the posted hours, dwell limits, and permitted users on each zone, harmonized from each city's own records into one schema. I am first author on the data descriptor, in preparation for Scientific Data. In parallel I built the strategy database for Seattle's Low-Pollution Neighborhoods program with SDOT.
Research experience
- 2026 –Urban Freight Lab, University of Washington — national loading-zone dataset (CVLZ); Low-Pollution Neighborhoods strategy database with SDOT. Advisor: Anne Goodchild.
- 2025 (summer)MSO Lab, KAIST — reading and presenting on sustainable operations, supply-chain compliance and risk, and behavioral decision-making; research proposal on supplier compliance under the EU CSDDD. Advisor: Woonam Hwang.
- 2024 – 2025MSS Lab, KAIST — genetic algorithm with neighborhood search for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, with an LLM tuning hyperparameters from run logs; B.S. thesis. Advisor: Hyun-Jung Kim.
- 2020 – 2021DAIM Lab, KAIST × General Motors — agent-based discrete-event simulation of an AGV-based EV assembly plant; routing and dispatching logic in Python. Advisor: Young Jae Jang.
Education
- 2020 – 2027 (exp.)KAIST — B.S., Industrial & Systems Engineering; double major in Computer Science
- 2025 – 2026University of Washington — exchange student, Seattle