Young-Kee Kim

Professor
Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College

Young-Kee Kim
Address:
MCP 135
Email:
youngkee@uchicago.edu
Website:
http://hep.uchicago.edu/~ykkim/index.shtml

Background

Prof. Young-Kee Kim is the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at UChicago and the Director Emeritus of Fermilab, America’s Particle Physics and Accelerator Laboratory. Previously she served as the President of the American Physical Society (APS).

Prof. Kim received her BS (1984) and MS (1986) in physics from Korea University in South Korea, and her Ph.D. (1990) from the University of Rochester. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and became Assistant (1996), Associate (2000), and Full (2002) Professor at Univ. of California, Berkeley. She moved to UChicago in 2003 and served as chair of the Department of Physics between 2016 and 2022.  She served as Interim Director (2025) and Deputy Director (2006-2013) of Fermilab.

Prof. Kim is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and a fellow of the APS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She received the Ho-Am Prize, the Arthur L. Kelly UChicago Faculty Prize, and the Korean American Pioneer Award.

Research

Throughout Prof. Kim’s career, she has made major contributions to experimental particle physics, using the world’s highest energy colliders: the TRISTAN electron-positron collider in Japan, and the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider in the U.S., followed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. Prof. Kim’s primary research focus has been understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles (the Higgs mechanism), one of the central questions in physics. Prof. Kim’s research group has led precise measurements of both the W and top-quark masses (predicting the Higgs boson mass), and subsequently the Higgs’s decay properties (the Higgs boson decaying into two bottom quarks and into two dark matter particles) and the Higgs potential (via production of two Higgs bosons). A complete understanding of the Higgs mechanism is only possible by a synthesis of all these facets, a guiding principle behind Prof. Kim’s research program.

In addition, Kim has been exploiting novel concepts in accelerator science and technology, studying limitations affecting the acceleration and intensity of particle beams at a fundamental level, and developing new approaches, including AI, to overcome these limitations.

News & Highlights

CV

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