Jim Yong Kim
South Korean-American physician and anthropologist, 12th President of the World Bank

Jim Yong Kim (born December 8, 1959), also known as Kim Yong (Korean: 김용; Hanja: 金墉), is an American physician and anthropologist who was the president of the World Bank from 2012 to 2019.
Kim chaired the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and was co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health before becoming president of Dartmouth College from 2009 to 2012. He was the first Asian American president of an Ivy League institution.
Kim was named the world's 50th most powerful person by Forbes Magazine's List of The World's Most Powerful People in 2013.
Early life
Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy. Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, class president, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in human biology in 1982. He earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1993.
Career
Partners in Health (1987–2003)
Kim, Paul Farmer, Todd McCormack, Thomas J. White, and Ophelia Dahl co-founded Partners In Health (PIH) in 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jim Yong Kim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.