Hani Kim

Hani Kim is the Executive Director of the RIGHT foundation based in Seoul, Korea, with 19 years of experience in biomedical research in academia and global health R&D funding organizations.

She completed her PhD in Lab Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, Canada and post-doctoral training in molecular immunology at the Max-Planck Institute of Immunology, Germany, and an MPH at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she later served as a Research Associate and trained research officers at the icddr,b in Bangladesh and the Kenyan Medical Research Institute.

Prior to joining the RIGHT foundation in 2021, she developed and managed portfolios of vaccine discovery grants and molecular surveillance grants at the Gates Foundation in Seattle for 6.5 years. Hani has strong interests in the political origins of health inequity. Her recent articles include ‘We need people’s WHO to solve vaccine inequity, and we need it now’, ‘The implicit ideological function of the global health field and its role in maintaining relations of power’, ‘The sociopolitical context of the COVID-19 response in South Korea’, and ‘A critical assessment of the ideological underpinnings of current practice in global health and their historical origins’.