Meet Dr. Younsook Lim

President-elect’s partner is pediatrician, quality-of-care specialist

The Dartmouth community will be gaining two physicians when Dr. Jim Yong Kim takes office in July. Kim’s wife, Dr. Younsook Lim, is a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston and a specialist in improving the quality of health care services.

Dr. Younsook Lim and Dr. Jim Yong Kim have two sons, Thomas (8) and Nicolas Jin, who was born (7 pounds, 6 ounces) on Feb. 27, 2009—three days before the announcement of Kim’s appointment. “Baby and mom are doing great,” says Kim. (Photo: Getty Images)

Dr. Lim has held appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., and has worked in the pediatric practices of General Medical Associates and Brookside Health Center in Boston.

She was an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School from 1995 to 2003. From 2004 to 2005, she served as a medical officer at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, in the Evidence and Information for Policy Cluster and the Department of Child and Adolescent Health.

Recently, her work on health outcomes has taken her to Rwanda, where she has been a part of a project focused on improving care for children living with HIV.

A fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1986 and received her M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1992. She has also studied at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), and the Harvard School of Public Health.

At Dartmouth, she is interested in again working with TDI, as well as with the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

The couple has two children, Thomas, age eight, and Nicolas Jin, who was born Feb. 27, just in time for his father’s other big announcement. “Thomas said to me yesterday, ‘Daddy, why does everything have to happen to us at the same time?’” Kim told the crowd on March 2.

Of the name choice, Kim says that Nicolas means “victor of the people” and Jin means “progress.” He adds that the family “seriously considered” Samson (the Reverend Samson Occom was a Mohegan preacher who raised funds for the founding of Dartmouth), but that, “in the end we needed sign-off from Thomas, and he liked Nicolas.”