Kim was born in Jeonju in 1975. She graduated from Seoul National University in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and earned a master's degree there in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation, Quantum Hall Tunnel Junctions: Luttinger Liquid Physics, Quantum Coherence Effect and Fractional Quantum Numbers, was supervised by Eduardo Fradkin.