Her pioneering studies have laid the groundwork for the biology of microRNA and contributed to the improvement of RNA interference technologies.

Her academic journey then took her to the United States, where she took a position at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as a research assistant.

By the age of 35, Kim already had twenty-two of her papers published in well known and prestigious scientific publications, such as Science and Nature.

Located in Seoul National University, she began working with the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in 2012 as the founding director of the Center for RNA Research.

Research is focused on miRNAs, which are small non-coding RNAs involved in practically all working aspects of eukaryotic cells.

These studies can potentially open the doors to new forms of cancer treatment and stem cell engineering.

Based on this model, her research group discovered that most microRNA genes are transcribed by RNA polymerase II and that pri-miRNA processing is carried out by Drosha-DGCR8 complexes in the nucleus.

She also discovered the molecular basis for pri-miRNA recognition and cleavage by the Drosha-DGCR8 complexes,[12] and pre-miRNA processing by Dicer.