Young Kim, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Southern California (USC), died peacefully July 7, 2016, at the age of 93.
Born in South Korea in 1922, Kim attended Seoul Technical College from 1941 to 1943 and became a high school math teacher and then a principal. A post-World War II scholarship program gave him the opportunity to attend the University of Washington. He arrived in Seattle in 1948, and in 1950 completed an undergraduate degree in physics.
Kim then enrolled at Princeton and earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1954. In 1955, he returned to Washington as a faculty member. In 1960, he joined Bell Labs to work in high-field superconductors. With Philip Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winner in physics in 1976, they developed the Kim-Anderson theory, affecting the technology for years.
After a visiting professorship at the University of Tokyo from 1966 to 1967, Kim joined USC to establish a research center on low-temperature and solid-state physics. He was a visiting professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science from 1973 to 1974, and director of the U.S. Office of Naval Research in Tokyo from 1980 to 1982. He retired from USC in 1990.
Kim is survived by his wife, Janis; three children; and two granddaughters. A son predeceased him.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.