Young-Suk Kim is a professor and the Senior Associate Dean at the School of Education, University of California at Irvine. She received her Ed.D. at Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology with a concentration on Language and Literacy, and a minor concentration on Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education. She holds Master’s degrees in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from San Francisco State University as well as in Human Development and Culture from Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a classroom teacher in San Francisco, California.

Her scholarship focuses on understanding language and literacy development and effective instruction for racially, ethnically, economically, and linguistically diverse children, and helping them build strong foundations to support their success in school and beyond. Her specific areas of research include oral language, reading, writing, dyslexia, higher order cognitive skills. She has worked extensively with monolingual children from various linguistic backgrounds (e.g., English, Korean, Chinese, Spanish) and multilingual children in the US and other part of the world (low- and middle-income countries). Her research has been supported by the Institute of Education Science, the U. S. Department of Education, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Science Foundation. She is currently serving as the Editor-In-Chief for the journal Scientific Studies of Reading, and the Chair of the Vocabulary SIG for the American Educational Research Association, and on the advisory board for many national and international organizations (e.g., the National Center on Improving Literacy, Global Reading Network).