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Dr. Kim

Youngjung Rachel Kim, MD, PhD

Dr. Kim

Youngjung Rachel Kim, MD, PhD

Organization

Massachusetts General Hospital

Program

MGH Research Fellows

Year

2022

For nearly 30 years, the funding provided by the Rappaport Foundation to physicians and researchers has allowed brilliance to flourish and breakthroughs to triumph in the areas of neurologic diseases and mental illness.

Youngjung Rachel Kim, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital within the Center for Quantitative Health and the Center for Experimental Drugs and Diagnostics.

Originally from Seoul, Korea, Dr. Kim finished high school in Berlin, Germany and came to the U.S. to study Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She completed her MD/PhD from Columbia University, followed by psychiatry residency at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, graduating as Chief Resident with national recognitions including Alpha Omega Alpha, American Psychiatric Association Leadership Fellowship, and the Leon Levy Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience.

Dr. Kim chose to become a psychiatrist to focus on anorexia nervosa, the psychiatric illness with the highest mortality rate with no FDA-approved medications at this time. To improve the clinical outcomes through novel treatments, Dr. Kim is leading efforts to improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying anorexia nervosa leveraging molecular research at the bench using patient-derived cellular models in parallel with longitudinal clinical studies, to develop a high dimensional understanding of anorexia nervosa from cellular response to human behavior.

Clinically, Dr. Kim works in both the outpatient and emergency room settings as a practicing physician-scientist in the MGH Eating Disorders Clinical and Research Program and the MGH Acute Psychiatry Service.