Kim has had decades of teaching experience in teacher education and adult education in Australia and Vietnam. She started her academic career as a teacher educator at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, the Vietnam National University, Hanoi, where she worked for over 10 years. When in Vietnam, Kim also held an external position as a trainer at the Asian Institute of Technology Centre in Vietnam (AITCV) for over 8 years. In Australia, prior to her appointment at Monash University, Kim worked as a lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne, and as a lecturer in student learning at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, La Trobe University.

Kim holds a PhD in teacher education from the University of Melbourne, where she has also completed a Masters of Education. The title of her PhD thesis is ‘Paired-placements in teacher education: A socio-cultural activity theoretical perspective’. The study explores how TESOL pre-service teachers learn to teach English in the collaborative settings of paired-placements in their professional experience. Her Master’s thesis, titled ‘Applying a genre-based approach in teaching the writing of the English discussion genre to Vietnamese EFL students at the tertiary level’, supervised by Professor Frances Christie, received the John and Elizabeth Robertson Prize for being the most meritorious Master’s thesis within the Master of Education at the University of Melbourne in 2003.

Apart from her core interest in TESOL teacher education and ESL, Kim is also interested in Indigenous education and education policy. Kim has been invited to work as an independent research consultant for multiple research projects in Indigenous education at the Australian Catholic University and La Trobe University. Kim has published in high impact international journals, including The Teaching and Teacher Education, Critical Studies in Education, Current Issues in Language Planning, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, among others. Her latest book titled 'Education Policy: Mapping the Landscape and Scope' was published by Peter Lang Publishers, Frankfurt am Main in 2016. 

Kim has been awarded several prizes and awards from national and international professional bodies, including an Early Career Researcher Special Commendation Award from the Australian Association for Research in Education in 2015. She also won the 'Excellent Research Supervision Award' from the Governement of Vietnam in 2007, and several prizes and awards from the University of Melbourne for her Masters and PhD research.

Kim's interested to supervise HDRs and collaborate in the areas of teacher education, professional learning, TESOL, English language education, globalisation in education, Indigenous education, educational policy and leadership. She is also interested in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and activity theory, which she has been working since 2008.