Kyusik Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research is in geographic information science, with a focus on transportation and health geography. Much of his work centers on developing more reliable measures of spatial accessibility to healthcare resources, accounting for people’s travel behavior. It proceeds by identifying assumptions that conventional accessibility models leave unexamined and building models that relax those assumptions.

Within this area, he is particularly interested in access to emergency medical services, where delays carry immediate consequences for health outcomes. Related work spans primary care, intensive care capacity, and other healthcare resources, asking how urban-rural configurations shape both accessibility and the outcomes that follow from access. He is now extending this line of work from single-city studies to the national scale.

A second line of research examines how people respond to natural disasters, using large-scale mobility data to observe behavior before, during, and after hazard events. This work investigates where and when people move, and how movement patterns change over the course of an event.

Drawing on methods from GIS, spatial analysis, and machine learning, he seeks to better understand human geographic phenomena and to generate findings relevant to policy, particularly concerning spatial equity in access and the design of effective disaster response.