Sung Kyu Kim

Sung Kyu has combined diverse academic disciplines - from physical and social science to business - to better understand the important social and environmental issues of local community development and global food systems. He holds degrees in B.Sc. in environmental geography (Concordia), D.E.S.S. in management and sustainable development (HEC Montréal) and Master of Food and Resource Economics (UBC). Sung Kyu completed and successfully defended his doctoral research in February 2018 and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, University of Sussex). In 2010, Sung Kyu participated in an international nutrition and food security project in Rwanda where he gained first-hand experiences in conducting international research. During the fieldwork, he also proposed and initiated a number of pilot projects tackling rural food insecurity and improving local agriculture practices, including a locally designed & built compost tumbler machine. Building from this work, Sung Kyu received a research award from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to continue his research in Rwanda. At IDRC, Sung Kyu worked closely with the Agriculture and Food Security staff in support of the program’s work – in particular assisting in the management of the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund. In Rwanda, he independently conducted a participatory field based research where he successfully led a team of ten Rwandan university students to conduct a Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices study of >400 household surveys of the Girinka (the One-cow per poor family program) beneficiaries. Sung Kyu actively seeks to engage and volunteer in his local and farming community. While living in Vancouver, he participated as an ambassador of the David Suzuki Foundation’s Green Your Workplace program and as a sustainability committee member of the Strathcona Business Improvement Association. Moreover, his strong commitment to the sustainable food system has led him to explore and work in small-scale organic farming in various regions including Rwanda, Sénégal, the Gambia, as well as, in Canada, Italy and the United Kingdom.