Biography

Soowon Kim, PhD received a BS and a MS in Food and Nutrition from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. She received a PhD in Nutrition Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Her work at UNC included understanding the nutrition transition; examining trends in diet and diet-related noncommunicable diseases, the costs of the nutrition transition, and policy options to prevent diet-related chronic diseases in Asia and the Pacific; developing an index that evaluates overall healthfulness of lifestyle; and an analysis measuring the full economic costs of diet, physical activity, and obesity-related chronic diseases. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the W.K. Kellogg Scholars in Health Disparities Program and her work at the University of California, San Francisco program site focused on examining disparities in various health behaviors and outcomes. Currently, she is a data analyst/program manager for the Health Improvement Program (HIP) at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, where previously as a visiting scholar, she had collaborated on projects that investigated the effect of physical and social environments on health behaviors and outcomes. At HIP, she has been designing and evaluating several health promotion efforts conducted outside as well as within the University. She and her colleagues also developed the Community Healthy Living Index (CHLI), a tool that allows communities to assess their own opportunities for healthy eating and active living and then guides them through a change process. Her work is committed to improving health of every individual, including those who are disadvantaged. She is interested in providing practical guidance for health promotion programs and public policy addressing multiple pathways by which biological, behavioral and contextual contributors affect individual and population health. She is a nominated inductee of Delta Omega, the honorary society in public health and a member of the American Society for Nutrition and American Public Health Association.