Sun Gil Kim

Sun Kim is a Program Officer on the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  He joined the Foundation in 2014 and supports the Foundation’s effort to provide access to safely managed sanitation to the 4.5 billion people currently without it.  As a member of the Transformative Technology Commercialization team, Sun manages philanthropic investments in the area of international standards, reinvented toilet, omni-processor, and omni-ingestor working with a number of universities, non-profit organizations, and companies.  He also chairs ISO Project Committee PC 318.

Before joining the Foundation, Sun was an Associate Technical Fellow at Boeing Commercial Airplanes working for 28 years on pressurized doors structures, mechanisms, and systems design, analysis, build, test, and validation.  His areas of focus were safety, certification, reliability, functionality, ease of production, reduced weight, reduced costs, and value to the customer.  He was also an Authorized Representative of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration interfacing with regulators from the U.S, European Aviation Safety Agency, United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority, Russian, Chinese, and other national aviation authorities.

Prior to Boeing, Sun worked in the oil fields of the Middle East as a geophysical test engineer for Schlumberger Wireline Services.

Sun was born in Seoul, South Korea, lived in Brunei from the age of 6 to 8, and then moved to Washington state with his family.  He graduated from the University of Washington in 1984 with a BS in mechanical engineering.