Young-Kee Kim, Ph.D.

Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics, University of Chicago

Young-Kee Kim is an experimental particle physicist whose research focuses on understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Physics from Korea University, South Korea, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Before joining the University of Chicago in 2003, where she was chair of the Department of Physics from 2016-2022, she was a professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. During her tenure at the University of Chicago, she served as Deputy Director at Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory, Principal Investigator at the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

She is a member of National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.

She is 2024 president of the American Physical Society and was 2022-2023 president of the Korean American Scientists and Engineers Association.

She has served on numerous international advisory committees and boards, and currently serves on the board of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.