Seung-bum Kim is responsible for developing soil moisture retrieval algorithms for the SMAP SAR data. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1992 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in remote sensing from the University College London in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He worked on spaceborne photogrammetry and microwave radiometry while fulfilling the national service at KAIST until 2003. He conducted the postdoctoral research in ocean science at JPL until 2006. Since then he was a scientist simulating the L-band radiometry for the Aquarius mission at Remote Sensing Systems, CA. He joined JPL in 2009 as a scientist in the Water and Carbon Cycles Section. Current research includes microwave modelling and soil moisture retrieval with radar data. He received the graduate scholarship from KAIST, and paper awards from the U.K. and Korean remote sensing societies. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union.