Junyoung Kim

About

Junyoung Kim is a PhD student in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington, where he also serves as a Teaching Assistant in Korean. His fields of interest include film and cinema, gender and sexuality, Korean, queer politics, and activism. He holds a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, earned in 2024. In his academic role, he teaches courses such as First-Year Korean, including KOREAN 101 and KOREAN 102, during the Autumn 2025 and Winter 2026 terms. His research and teaching focus on Korean language and culture, with particular attention to issues of gender, sexuality, and activism within Korean society.

Research topics

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Biology
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Ecology
• Psychiatry
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Neurocognitive effects of stress: a metaparadigm perspective

  Molecular Psychiatry · 2023 · 93 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Stressful experiences, both physical and psychological, that are overwhelming (i.e., inescapable and unpredictable), can measurably affect subsequent neuronal properties and cognitive functioning of the hippocampus. At the cellular level, stress has been shown to alter hippocampal synaptic plasticity, spike and local field potential activity, dendritic morphology, neurogenesis, and neurodegeneration. At the behavioral level, stress has been found to impair learning and memory for declarative (or…

  DOI

• The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2023 · 80 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ecological analysis of Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats

  Communications Biology · 2022 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Pavlovian fear conditioning, which offers the advantage of simplicity in both the control of conditional and unconditional stimuli (CS, US) presentation and the analysis of specific conditional and unconditional responses (CR, UR) in a controlled laboratory setting, has been the standard model in basic and translational fear research. Despite 100 years of experiments, the utility of fear conditioning has not been trans-situationally validated in real-life contexts. We thus investigated whether f…

  DOI

• The circadian molecular clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus is necessary but not sufficient for fear entrainment

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-03-19 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  We show that nocturnal aversive stimuli presented to mice while they are eating and drinking outside of their safe nest can entrain circadian behaviors, leading to a shift toward daytime activity. We also show that the canonical molecular circadian clock is necessary for fear entrainment and that an intact molecular clockwork in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the site of the central circadian pacemaker, is necessary but not sufficient to sustain fear entrainment of circadian rhythms. Our results d…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author response: Periaqueductal gray activates antipredatory neural responses in the amygdala of foraging rats

  2024-08-02 · 5 citations

  peer-reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Pavlovian fear conditioning research suggests that the interaction between the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) acts as a prediction error mechanism in the formation of associative fear memories. However, their roles in responding to naturalistic predatory threats, characterized by less explicit cues and the absence of reiterative trial-and-error learning events, remain unexplored. In this study, we conducted single-unit recordings in rats during an ‘approach food…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH064457

  NIH · $2.6M · 2013

• Fear and Natural Risky Decisions in Rats

  NIH · $3.9M · 2013–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Jeiwon Cho

  Ewha Womans University

  43 shared

• Sanggeon Park

  33 shared

• Eun Joo Kim

  University of Washington

  32 shared

• Michael S. Fanselow

  Neurobehavioral Systems

  31 shared

• Richard F. Thompson

  22 shared

• Yeowool Huh

  Catholic Kwandong University

  18 shared

• Mi-Seon Kong

  University of Washington

  18 shared

• Shaowen Bao

  University of Arizona

  15 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  UCLA

  1991

• B.S., Psychobiology

  UCLA

  1987

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Weilin Kaoh-81
• Lü, Chanh-67
• Xi Zhuh-51