Hyoun-A Joo is currently an Assistant Professor of German at Georgia Tech. She completed her Magister Artium degree in German literature and a teaching certification for German as a foreign language at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Dr. Joo taught German in Seoul, South Korea, and Berlin before coming to the U.S. for her doctorate degree. She earned her Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University in German Applied Linguistics and Language Science.

For her dissertation, she interviewed first generation Korean immigrants in Germany to learn more about how they came to (former West) Germany and how they acquired German. The particular linguistic phenomenon she investigated was the acquisition of the asymmetric verb placement in German. Dr. Joo is interested in further exploring the intersection between language acquisition, migration, and identity.