Kim was born in Jeonju in 1975.[4] She graduated from Seoul National University in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and earned a master's degree there in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[3] Her dissertation, Quantum Hall Tunnel Junctions: Luttinger Liquid Physics, Quantum Coherence Effect and Fractional Quantum Numbers, was supervised by Eduardo Fradkin.[4]
After postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Kim joined the Cornell University faculty in 2008, and was promoted to full professor in 2019.[3]
Recognition
In 2020, Kim was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics, "for broad contributions to theoretical condensed matter physics, including new conceptual frameworks for interpreting experiments".[5] In 2022 she was awarded a Simons Fellowship.[6]