Beong-Soo (“Beong”) Kim has served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the University of Southern California since July 2020.

In addition to advising the president and senior leadership team, Beong works closely with the university’s Board of Trustees, serves as secretary to the USC Health System’s Board of Directors, and has well-established collaborative working relationships with deans, faculty, and staff across USC and Keck Medicine.

Since his arrival at USC, Beong has played a key leadership role in advancing a wide range of important university initiatives related to academics, advancement, athletics, healthcare, research, and student life. Along with his team, he advised and provided counsel to the university’s leadership on the most critical issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his team also resolved the university’s legacy litigation matters, and helped redesign the governance model for USC’s health system and health science schools while supporting important health system acquisitions. He co-led the overhaul of student conduct processes, provided campus-wide education on free speech and academic freedom, and improved accountability in areas ranging from admissions and patient privacy to cybersecurity and public safety. Additionally, he has successfully negotiated the completion of major gifts and groundbreaking research initiatives.

Over the last five years, Beong has also been deeply involved with athletics-related issues, including conference realignment, the evolving regulatory landscape, and NIL. In 2023, he was proud to serve on the athletics department’s interim leadership team.

Before joining USC, Beong worked for nearly six years at Kaiser Permanente, overseeing all its major litigation, investigatory, and health-plan regulatory matters nationwide. Prior to that, he was a partner at an international law firm and spent nearly nine years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was ultimately promoted to chief of the Major Frauds Section in Los Angeles. Under his leadership, he and his team of prosecutors received national recognition for their investigations and prosecutions of various cases, including Ponzi schemes, insider trading, trade secret theft, embezzlement, bank fraud, healthcare fraud, immigration fraud, tax evasion, espionage, and foreign corruption.

Beong is a frequent speaker on issues relating to higher education, college athletics, and health care. As part of his commitment to education, he has served as a teaching fellow in constitutional interpretation at Harvard University, a trial advocacy instructor at the National Advocacy Center in South Carolina, and an adjunct professor at USC’s Gould School of Law.

Beong sits on the boards of Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, School on Wheels, and the Vicente Chamber Orchestra. During the pandemic, Beong, an accomplished cellist, and his wife, Bonnie Wongtrakool, performed a series of neighborhood “porch concerts” featured in the Los Angeles Times.

The son of two Korean immigrants who both attended graduate school at USC, Beong believes deeply in the transformative power of education. Born and raised in the Los Angeles area, he attended local public schools before receiving an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He also obtained a master’s degree from the London School of Economics as a Rotary Foundation Scholar, and a law degree from Harvard Law School, where he graduated with honors.