Human societies are complex systems. Our institutions, platforms, and policies rest on assumptions about how people perceive, decide, and act. I am a computer scientist who builds societal simulations to test—and challenge—those assumptions so we can better reason about high‑stakes decisions. My research introduced generative agents, language‑model‑based actors with memory, reflection, and planning, and developed methods to ground these agents in real‑world data and validate their simulated attitudes and behaviors against ground truth. I run population‑scale simulations with agents representative of real‑world populations.

I have been featured in The Times, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, WIRED, TED AI, MIT Technology Review, Scientific American, Science, and Nature. I have received Best Paper Awards at UIST and CHI, the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship, the Terry Winograd Fellowship, and a Siebel Scholarship. I hold a B.A. in Computer Science from Swarthmore College, an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

People call me Joon, pronounced like the sixth month of the year.