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Dr. Shinye Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Licensed Psychologist. I completed my doctoral training in Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (APA-accredited) with a minor in Educational Statistics and Measurement and an APA-accredited internship at NYC Health + Hospitals|Kings County, part of the largest public health care system in the United States. I also received an M.Ed. in Prevention Science and Practice from Harvard University. I have broad experience working with populations across diverse healthcare settings, spanning urban and rural areas in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New York, and Texas. My clinical expertise ranges from inpatient to outpatient care, addressing psychological adjustment challenges to severe mental health issues, and temporary to chronic and terminal illnesses.
My research examines how social, cultural, linguistic, and psychological contexts shape the experience and communication of chronic pain, particularly among ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. My research in pain science is rooted in and remains deeply informed by my clinical work with patients navigating chronic pain, medical illness, and recovery across hospital and community health settings. In those spaces, I witnessed both the profound capacity of psychological intervention and the ways pain is inextricably bound to patients’ emotional, social, and cultural worlds. I became captivated by pain’s fundamentally subjective nature—a quality that makes it both scientifically challenging to measure and clinically essential to understand. I 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 my sustained fascination with the complexity of subjective pain experience—remains the moral and intellectual foundation of my scholarly work. Given that pain is a universal human experience and the leading cause of healthcare visits, my 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. My 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, I direct the Pain, Context, and Innovation (PCI) Lab, where I bring 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, my team engages in translational research by developing AI-based algorithms and tools to advance context-informed pain assessment and treatment. Our 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, we work 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.
Research
Research
From the beginning of my training, I have been drawn to how context shapes people's lives—whether in the work–family interface, work and career development, or health and illness. My early interest in vocational psychology emerged from a fundamental curiosity about how work, family, and identity factors such as gender norms and minority stress influence wellbeing and work trajectories. Later, during advanced health psychology training, I witnessed how social context shaped the marginalization of patients with chronic pain, who were often dismissed or blamed not only by health professionals but also within their own families and communities.
These formative experiences converged into a research program centered on context as a determinant of both career and health outcomes. My primary focus is on multicultural health psychology, specifically chronic pain and opioid use, where I investigate how physical, emotional, and social pain intersect, and how discrimination, language barriers, and cultural factors shape pain experiences, communication, and treatment among racially and linguistically diverse populations. Chronic pain affects nearly one-third of U.S. adults and is a leading driver of healthcare utilization, making it both a major public health concern and a profoundly human experience that calls for scientific innovation and humanistic understanding.
I integrate innovation through mixed methods, digital health, and artificial intelligence to develop translational tools—such as multilingual, multimodal pain assessment algorithms and platforms—that translate contextual insights into practice and advance access in care. As a vocational psychologist at heart, I incorporate work–family dynamics and identity factors as key contextual determinants of health in my pain research, recognizing how career development, work–family conflict and enrichment, and contextualized identity factors influence both health and career-related outcomes.
Clinical Experience
Clinical Experience
In my clinical experience, I have provided treatment to underserved and underrepresented populations in a variety of settings reflecting a broad range of cultures, ethnicities, and other social contexts. They include urban areas in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York— ranging from inpatient to outpatient, psychological adjustment challenges to serious mental health issues, and temporary to chronic and terminal illness. I received extensive clinical training in health/medical psychology during my doctorate in the areas of consultation and liaison psychology and pain management as well as severe mental health illness and during my master’s in adolescent adjustment counseling. My work has consistently been multidisciplinary, involving collaboration with various healthcare providers, including social workers, nurses, physicians, and physical and occupational therapists. This experience has informed my training and supervision of students in Wisconsin, New York, and Texas.
A central part of my identity as a clinician has been my psychoanalytic training. In addition to my background in cognitive-behavioral therapies, I completed four years of advanced psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Institute. This training profoundly shaped my clinical sensibility through weekly seminars, monthly clinical moments meetings, five years of four-times-weekly personal analysis, and supervision by senior training analysts. The depth of this work continues to enrich not only my professional practice but also my understanding of human complexity, meaning, and resilience.
Mentoring and Teaching
Mentoring and Teaching
Mentoring has been one of my most cherished activities as a professor. I lead an active research team of doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate students with diverse aspirations, including those who have gone on to work as counselors, psychologists, physicians, nurses, dentists, entrepreneurs, and health care researchers. I am proud to say that this is one of the most fulfilling aspects of my job.
I feel strongly about the importance of collaborating with students as well as scholars across disciplines. I involve graduate students in research early in their training, using both the “apprentice model” and the “junior colleague model,” depending on their developmental level. Many of my students have been highly successful in obtaining external and internal grants, awards, and fellowships. Having received excellent mentorship myself, I understand its importance and am deeply committed to paying it forward.
Beyond Academia
Beyond Academia
I love being in nature, from small adventures exploring local parks to longer voyages to state and national parks. Recently, I have gotten back into playing piano. Chopin was the first to re-introduce me to piano, and then Rachmaninoff, and most recently I have fallen in love with Bach. I am deeply grateful for my piano teachers in Texas, Dr. Jeyeon Kim and Dr. Hye Gyung Ji, and here in Wisconsin, Dr. Lina Yoomin Lee.
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