Kimberly Ku, MD, is a community physician partner at Illinois CancerCare working out of central Illinois. She is a medical oncologist and hematologist entering mid-career, possessing broad research, administrative, and practice interests and capabilities as a true generalist physician partner, including triple board certifications in Medical Oncology, Hematology, Internal Medicine, and additional certification in Genomic Cancer Risk Assessment. She has interest in and passion for future executive leadership opportunities, and currently her practice has sponsored and professionally supported her as ResearcHER ambassador for the American Cancer Society this year, a position which has greatly helped her to collaborate peacefully with local institutions among competing markets with her practice as well as break down barriers in diversity and inclusion.
Kim’s career and fundamental passion comes in the form of building long term relationships based upon shared core values and missions. Hence many of her projects manifest as multi-institutional collaborations in which individual stories are the building blocks of trust- and empathy-based bodies of work larger than the sum of the parts. She was able to integrate her practice into the international Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection Consortium for she is site Principal Investigator and her practice enrolled their first patient in July 2024.
Kim became a medical oncologist in the wake of losing a college friend to young onset colon cancer. This experience at a relatively formative age taught her that even the darkest chapters of life can yield lessons of curiosity and enterprises of empathy. Hence even beyond the medical world she has embarked on understanding greater endeavors of humanitarianism, in which she has been invited to the filming of a TV show with former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, “That’s Right”, on the Success Network, in order to discuss how trust and empathy play important roles in business relationships. She continues to delve deeper in the unlocking of her potential for greater good through professional interactions with the Celebrity Branding Agency and the Black Swan Group.
Kim enjoys spending time with her family including park runs and farm events with her three boys and her husband, in addition to visiting her parents in Michigan. She enjoys exercising to podcasts and watching horror films. Her personal dream is that she would like to learn how to manage her own farm with socially responsible energy use.
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