Soonhee Kim is a Professor of Public Administration at the Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and Management in Sejong, Korea. She has been a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (Washington, D.C.) since 2016. Her expertise spans public management, governance, human resource management, and leadership development. Prior to joining the KDI School in 2014, she was a professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York.
Professor Kim’s extensive publications (1998–2024) have placed her among the world’s top 2% of career-long social scientists in 2023, 2024, and 2025, according to the Elsevier–Stanford University rankings. In the fields of public administration and management, her annual citation impact has consistently ranked among the top 2% worldwide for seven consecutive years (2019–2025). In addition, her co-authored article, Platform Government in the Era of Smart Technology (Public Administration Review, 2022), was recognized as one of the ten most-cited papers in PAR for both 2022 and 2023 (Clarivate Analytics).
She serves on the editorial boards of several leading international journals in public administration and was an advisory group member for the OECD Guidelines on Measuring Trust (2017). She also participated in the KDI School–OECD collaborative research project Understanding the Drivers of Trust in Government Institutions in Korea (2018). Professor Kim is co-editor and chapter author of several books, including Bringing Government into the 21st Century: The Korean Digital Governance Experience (2016), Public Administration in the Context of Global Governance (2014), Public Sector Human Resource Management (2012), and The Future of Public Administration around the World: The Minnowbrook Perspective (2010).