She also currently serves as a visiting scholar in the Department of Education at UCLA and as a senior researcher at the Veterans Higher Education Resource Center in Fullerton, California. She received her Ph.D. in Higher Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining the faculty at APU, Kim served as a research analyst in the Office of Research and Planning at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California. Her research interests include college impact, college student development, conditional effects of college experience, and diversity and educational equity in higher education. Kim's work has been published in Research in Higher Education, the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and the Journal of the Professoriate.