Young-Kee Kim

Young-Kee Kim, an experimental particle physicist, is the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and chair of the department of physics at the University of Chicago.

Young-Kee Kim is currently the APS president-elect. She served as APS vice president in 2022.

She has devoted much of her research work to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles by studying the two most massive particles (the W boson and the top quark) and the Higgs particle that gives mass to elementary particles. Between 2004 and 2006, she was the co-spokesperson (scientific leader) of the CDF experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron, a collaboration with more than 600 physicists from around the world. Between 2006 and 2013, she was deputy director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). She is currently working on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC at CERN. She devotes some of her time on accelerator physics and in educating the next generation of accelerator physicists. She has served on numerous national and international advisory committees, councils and boards.

Kim was born in South Korea and earned her B.S. and M.S. in physics from Korea University, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1990. Her postdoctoral research was done at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was an assistant, associate and full professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, she moved to the University of Chicago.

She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Sloan Foundation. She received the Ho-Am Prize, the Women in Science Leadership Award from the Chicago Council of Science and Technology, South Korea’s Science and Education Service Medal, the University of Rochester’s Distinguished Scholar Medal and Korea University’s Alumni Award.