Kim completed her undergraduate studies at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1991, and earned a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1997 supervised by Roger Howe. At Yale, she was also mentored by Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro.
Her research involves the representation theory of p-adic groups. After postdoctoral study at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Michigan, she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002, and moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to the representation theory of semisimple groups over nonarchimedean local fields and for service to the profession."
Her husband, Paul Seidel, is also a mathematician at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
