Jeong H. Kim

Jeong Kim at the 2009 World Economic Forum

Dr. Jeong-Hoon Kim (Korean: 김종훈) (born 1961) is a Korean-American electrical engineer and administrator who, since 2005, has served as president of Bell Labs.

Jeong Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. He came to the U.S. from Korea with his father and stepmother at the age of 14. He began school in Anne Arundel County, Maryland with no knowledge of English. At sixteen, he left home and supported himself with odd jobs while he completed high school. He was accepted at Johns Hopkins University, where he completed his degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in three years while working for a start-up computer firm called Digitus, in which he eventually became a partner.

Kim then joined the U.S. Navy, where he served as a nuclear submarine officer for seven years. During this period he also obtained a master's degree in Technical Management from Johns Hopkins. When he returned to civilian life, Kim worked for AlliedSignal at the Naval Research Laboratory, and again returned to school. After just two years of study, he received his Ph.D. in 1991 in reliability engineering, the first doctorate in that field awarded by the University of Maryland.^[1]

In 1992, Dr. Kim started his own firm, Yurie Systems, to promote his own ideas about streamlining electronic communications between different systems. There, he led the development of an asynchronous transfer mode switch for wireless devices. The company was very successful, and, in 1998, Lucent paid over one billion dollars to acquire it. Kim stayed on with Lucent as a division president until 2001, when he returned to the University of Maryland as Professor of Practice in Reliability Engineering, with a joint appointment in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials and Nuclear Engineering.^[2]

In 1998, The Korea Society honored Dr. Kim with its annual James A. Van Fleet Award for his contributions to closer U.S.-Korea relations. He has been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. The University of Maryland gave him its Innovation Hall of Fame award, and further honored him with the construction and naming of the Jeong H. Kim Engineering and Applied Sciences Building.^[2] In addition, Dr. Kim serves on the boards of many academic, corporate, and non-profit organizations, including the NASDAQ Listing and Hearing Review Council and In-Q-Tel^[3]

In March 2003, Dr. Kim led an investor group that purchased Cibernet from the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. He assumed Cibernet's chairmanship intending "to introduce new technologies that [would] benefit wireless carriers around the world."^[4] He left Cibernet in April, 2005, when he returned to Lucent to become President of their renowned Bell Labs division.

Dr. Kim was nominated as Minister of Future Creation and Science for South Korea and he has stated that he had signed to abandon his US citizenship to become the minister of South Korea as of February 14, 2013.^[5] However, on March 4, 2013, he held a press conference at the National Assembly to announce his withdrawal from the candidacy.^[6][7]

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