After graduating from Gyeonggi Girls' High School in 1966, Chung studied physics at Seoul National University, completing her undergraduate studies in 1970. Continuing her education, she earned a PhD in the field of particle physics from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania in 1977. Her dissertation was titled, Chiral calculations of the phase shifts for the π, K system. While in Pittsburgh, she married her classmate, Kyungsoo Jeong (Korean : 정경수), a fellow physicist who would go on to work researching missiles at the Defense Science Research Institute in Seoul.