Andrea Kim

Andrea was born in South Korea, raised in northern Virginia, and received her BA in Psychology with a minor in Chinese Language and Culture from Northwestern University. After completing the pre-medicine track, she became a Certified Clinical Research Coordinator at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her collaborations with cardiac surgeons introduced her to the realm of medical illustration (her first artwork published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery) and ultimately to the delightful discovery of the Biomedical Visualization graduate program at UIC.

Since beginning the program, Andrea has been astounded by the integrative capabilities of medicine, art, and technology in our field and has especially enjoyed her introduction to 3D modeling, Unity, Haptics, and coding. Currently she is aiming to get as much exposure as possible to working with Virtual Reality (Oculus Rift), Augmented Reality, Haptics, and other digital interactives.

As an experienced gamer, Andrea is thrilled to use her expertise in creating new and effective visual learning methods that will also be fun. Her academic and working experience has informed her understanding of: the communication gap between medical providers and the community; the increasing stress levels of medical students; and, the lack of information on both advanced western treatments and eastern holistic medicine she experienced during her study-abroad in Traditional Chinese Medicine at Peking University. She aims to address these issues using advancing gaming technologies to reduce the stress of learning and to progress knowledge in health, nutrition, and medicine.