Jeong H. Kim

Who is Jeong H. Kim?

Dr. Jeong-Hoon Kim 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.

In 1992, Dr.