Yang-Gyu Kim is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (FIU). He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from FIU (2019) and received his Master’s degree in International Relations from Seoul National University (2014). Kim joined the Ph.D. program at FIU with a Fulbright Graduate Study Award. He received the Smith Richardson Foundation’s World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship award,  the FIU University Graduate School’s Doctoral Evidence Acquisition Fellowship, and the Dissertation Year Fellowship for his dissertation work. In his dissertation entitled “After Deterrence: Policy Choices during Crises of Conventional and Nuclear Direct Deterrence Failure,” Kim advanced the Feasibility of Punishment model to explain conditions for direct deterrence failure and policy choices of the defender after failure. He tested the validity of the model against the population of direct deterrence failure (192 cases) and five selected cases (the 1936 Rhineland Crisis, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1969 Sino-USSR Border Dispute, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 Falklands War). Before he started his doctoral training, Kim worked as a research fellow in the East Asia Institute (EAI), a MacArthur Foundation’s Asia Security Initiative entity in Seoul, South Korea. At EAI, his research focused on U.S.-China relations and the North Korean nuclear problem. Kim is currently researching the military and political measures of nuclear powers after direct deterrence failure and small powers’ strategies of deterring stronger adversaries. He is also developing his dissertation into a book manuscript.