Shinye Kim

Dr. Shinye Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Licensed Psychologist. Her research examines how social, cultural, linguistic, and psychological contexts shape the experience and communication of chronic pain, particularly among ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. Her research in pain science is rooted in and remains deeply informed by her clinical work with patients navigating chronic pain, medical illness, and recovery across hospital and community health settings. In those spaces, she witnessed both the profound capacity of psychological intervention and the ways pain is inextricably bound to patients’ emotional, social, and cultural worlds. She became captivated by pain’s fundamentally subjective nature—a quality that makes it both scientifically challenging to measure and clinically essential to understand. She also observed a troubling pattern: how people with chronic pain are so often relegated to the margins, dismissed or blamed by healthcare systems and intimate circles alike, in part because their subjective experience is difficult to validate or measure within conventional medical frameworks. This clinical witnessing—and her sustained fascination with the complexity of subjective pain experience—remains the moral and intellectual foundation of her scholarly work. Given that pain is a universal human experience and the leading cause of healthcare visits, her work contributes to reimagining how pain is understood, assessed, and treated—particularly for communities who have been rendered invisible within healthcare systems and whose experiences have been routinely overlooked or invalidated. Her work has been nationally recognized with the American Psychological Association Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Research in Counseling Health Psychology and the American Psychological Association Section on Ethnic and Racial Diversity Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship on Race and Ethnicity Award.

Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), among others, Dr. Kim directs the Pain, Context, and Innovation (PCI) Lab, where she brings together students and collaborators from diverse disciplines to advance this vision through four interconnected areas of inquiry: basic science, translational research, theoretical scholarship, and community-clinical collaborations. Basic research in the lab examines the multilevel mechanisms—linguistic, psychological, and sociocultural—through which culture shapes pain experience and communication, using qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods. Building on these insights, the team engages in translational research by developing AI-based algorithms and tools to advance context-informed pain assessment and treatment. The lab’s theoretical and critical scholarship explores how sociohistorical forces—such as the legacies of the Opium Wars—continue to influence contemporary discourses on pain, addiction, race, and moral judgment in healthcare. In community-clinical collaborations, the PCI Lab works with the Departments of Family Medicine and Surgery at UW Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin to implement pain behavioral interventions for trauma patients as a preventive approach to opioid-related risks and harms.

Dr. Kim has extensive clinical experience in medical and hospital settings, including pain management and consultation–liaison psychiatry, and completed four years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Institute. She serves on the editorial boards of Health Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Psychology of Men and Masculinities, and Journal of Career Assessment.

Dr. Kim will be accepting doctoral students to join the Pain, Context, and Innovation Lab in Fall 2026.