Young-Kee Kim
Chair, Department of Physics
Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College
Senior Advisor to the Provost for Global Scientific Initiatives
The University of Chicago
Young-Kee Kim is the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and Chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago.
As Senior Advisor to the Provost for Global Scientific Initiatives, Young-Kee advances the University’s global reach and reputation in the sciences and helps support the community of international scholars and students at the University. She is responsible for strategic reviews of international cross-collaborative science initiatives, creating and sustaining international opportunities for faculty and students, and partnering to coordinate and enhance current capacities, and serving as a point person in the exploration of new opportunities in the sciences, globally, as they emerge.
Young-Kee is an experimental particle physicist, and devotes much of her research to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles. Between 2004 and 2006, she co-led the CDF experiment at Fermilab, a collaboration with more than 600 particle physicists from around the world. She is currently working on the ATLAS particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as well as on accelerator physics research. She was Deputy Director of Fermilab between 2006 and 2013 and has served on numerous national and international advisory committees and boards. She is now chairing the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society.
Prior to Chicago, Young-Kee was Professor of Physics at University of California, Berkeley. She was born in South Korea, and earned her BS and MS in Physics from Korea University, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1990. She conducted her postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Young-Kee 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, the University of Rochester’s Distinguished Scholar Medal, and Korea University’s Alumni Award.