Korean Americans (Korean: 한국계 미국인, Hanja: 韓國系美國人, Hangukgye Migukin) are Americans of Korean descent, mostly from South Korea, with a small minority from North Korea. The Korean American community comprises about 0.6% of the United States population, or about 1.7 million people, and is the fifth largest Asian American subgroup, after the Chinese American, Filipino American, Indian American, and Vietnamese American communities. The U.S. is home to the second largest Korean diaspora community in the world after the People's Republic of China.

While people living in North Korea cannot leave or emigrate from their country with rare exceptions, there are numbers of people of North Korean origin living in the U.S., primarily those who fled to the south during the Korean War and then later migrated to the United States. Also, since the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 allowed North Korean defectors to be admitted as refugees, about 130 have settled in the U.S. under that status.

According to the 2010 Census, there were approximately 1.7 million people of Korean descent residing in the United States, making it the country with the second largest Korean population living outside Korea (after the People's Republic of China). The ten states with the largest estimated Korean American populations were California (452,000; 1.2%), New York (141,000, 0.7%), New Jersey (94,000, 1.1%), Virginia (71,000, 0.9%), Texas (68,000, 0.3%), Washington (62,400, 0.9%), Illinois (61,500, 0.5%), Georgia (52,500, 0.5%), Maryland (49,000, 0.8%), and Pennsylvania (41,000, 0.3%). Hawaii was the state with the highest concentration of Korean Americans, at 1.8%, or 23,200 people.

Margaret Cho (born December 5, 1968) is an American comedian, fashion designer, actress, author, and singer-songwriter. Cho, of Korean descent, is best known for her stand-up routines, through which she critiques social and political problems, especially those pertaining to race and sexuality. She has also directed and appeared in music videos and has her own clothing line. She has frequently supported LGBT rights and has won awards for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of women, Asians, and the LGBT community.

As an actress she has played more serious parts, such as Charlene Lee in It's My Party and that of John Travolta's FBI colleague in the action movie Face/Off. She is part of the TV series Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime Television, playing the role of Teri Lee, a paralegal assistant.

Cho was born into a Korean family in San Francisco, California. She grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s, which she described as a community of "old hippies, ex-druggies, burn-outs from the '60s, drag queens, Chinese people, and Koreans. To say it was a melting pot — that's the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time."

Jim Yong Kim, also known as Kim Yong (Hangul: 김용; Hanja: 金墉; born December 8, 1959) is a Korean-American physician and the president-elect of the World Bank. He has been President of Dartmouth College since 2009. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health.

On March 2, 2009, Kim was named as the 17th president of Dartmouth College, a position he formally assumed on July 1, 2009, becoming the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League institution.

On March 23, 2012, President Barack Obama announced that the United States would nominate Kim as the next president of the World Bank. On April 16, Kim was elected to head the World Bank and will take office on July 1.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy. Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, president of his class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD from Harvard University, Department of Anthropology, in 1993. He was among the first enrollees of Harvard's experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.

David Chang (Korean language: 장석호, Chang Seok-ho) (August 5, 1977 -) is a noted Korean-American chef. He is chef/owner of the Momofuku restaurant group, which includes Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Má Pêche, Milk Bar and Momofuku Ko in New York City, and Momofuku Seiōbo in Sydney, Australia. In 2009 Ko was awarded 2 Michelin stars, which it still maintains. Chang attended Georgetown Prep and then Trinity College, where he majored in religious studies. Chang later attended the French Culinary Institute (FCI).

As a child, Chang was a competitive golfer who participated in a number of junior tournaments, several of which Tiger Woods was also a participant in. After graduating college with no particular plan, Chang pursued a variety of jobs, including teaching English in Japan, then bussing tables and holding finance positions in New York City. He worked at Mercer Kitchen in Manhattan and in the year 2000, got a job answering phones at Tom Colicchio's Craft restaurant. Chang stayed at Craft for two years and then moved back to Japan to work at a small soba shop, followed by a restaurant in Tokyo's Park Hyatt Hotel. Upon returning to the U.S. Chang worked at Café Boulud, but soon grew "completely dissatisfied with the whole fine dining scene".