Kimberly Kim, CIH, CSP, PG

Kim Kim built her career at the boundaries between disciplines: first in volcanology and planetary geoscience, then across environmental consulting, industrial hygiene, construction, drilling, and field operations.

Her early research focused on reconstructing complex physical systems from incomplete evidence from the eruption history and stratigraphy of Hanauma Bay to contemporary slope processes on Mars. That same habit of asking what happened here, what evidence supports it, and what are we missing? carried directly into applied field work.

Over the next two decades, her work expanded into contaminated-site characterization, Multi Increment sampling, drilling and subsurface investigation, hazardous materials, worker exposure, construction oversight, regulatory coordination, and complex field programs. Each discipline added another way to examine the same fundamental problem: how materials, people, equipment, environment, procedures, and assumptions interact in the real world.

The connection to space is a continuation of that work. Remote and off-world systems magnify familiar challenges: limited information, difficult access, hazardous materials, constrained logistics, dust and exposure, material recovery, human performance, and the consequences of getting an assumption wrong.

RISE was founded to bring that cross-disciplinary perspective to organizations working on problems that are new, consequential, or simply too complicated to belong to one field.