Hyun Cheol Kim earned his bachelor's degree from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, on the effect of deep convection on temperatures in the tropical tropopause layer. After receiving his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on air quality studies using CMAQ with Dr. Daewon Byun at the University of Houston. Since 2009, Dr. Kim has been a research scientist at the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, where he has focused his research on air quality forecasting, fire emissions, remote sensing, and geospatial data processing. He is also an expert in computational languages such as IDL.