She received her Ph.D. in 1998 from Oxford University, UK, where she studied the functions of retroviral proteins in the construction of gene transfer vectors. She then carried out her postdoctoral research on mRNA surveillance in the laboratory of Gideon Dreyfuss at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She set up her own lab in 2001 and has been investigating how microRNAs are made and regulated, and what microRNAs do to modulate cell signaling in cancer and embryonic stem cells. Her research group identified several key factors in the microRNA pathway including Drosha, DGCR8, Lin28, and TUT4, and discovered pluripotent stem cell-specific microRNAs such as human miR-302, miR-369, and miR-371. Narry Kim is a recipient of L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science (2008) and the Ho-Am Prize in medicine (2009).