Soo Yeon Kim is an Associate Professor with the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), Editor of Pacific Affairs, and the Korea Foundation Chair at the University of British Columbia. Her research area is international political economy with a specialization in trade politics. Her current projects include the politics of trade agreements, rising powers and global economic governance, and regional integration in Asia. Her teaching areas include International Political Economy, in particular the Politics of Trade, IPE of Asia, and Emerging Markets; and Research Methods, including Research Design and Quantitative Methods.

Before taking up her appointment at SPPGA, Soo Yeon Kim was Associate Professor and former Head of Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. She has held Fellowships at the Transatlantic Academy, based at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (Washington, DC); the East-West Center in Washington, D.C.; and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Sooyeon holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea).

Soo Yeon Kim has authored or edited monographs on the Power and the Governance of Global Trade: From the GATT to the WTO (2010, Cornell University Press); Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011, Transatlantic Academy, with Daniel Deudney, James Goldgeier, Steffen Kern, Hanns W. Maull, and Iskander Rehman); Regional Architecture and Framework for Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (2015, National University of Singapore, with Ryoko Nakano and Ja Ian Chong); and BRICS and the Global Economy (2020, Editor, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing). Her research has also been published widely in major scholarly journals, including International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Organization, World Trade Review, and Journal of East Asian Studies, among others.