Hongkun Park received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from the College of Natural Sciences at Seoul National University, Korea, where he graduated summa cum laude and Valedictorian in 1990. Following a year of mandatory military service in the Republic of Korea Army, he proceeded to Stanford University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1996 under the direction of Richard N. Zare, with a thesis on photoionization dynamics of nitric oxide probed by angle- and energy-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy.

He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in 1999 after a three-year postdoctoral fellowship with Paul Alivisatos and Paul McEuen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research dealt with electron transport through individual nanocrystals and nanocrystal arrays. He received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award and Research Corporation Research Innovation Award in 1999, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2001, the NSF-CAREER Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2002, the Visiting Miller Research Professorship from the University of California at Berkeley, the Ho-Am Foundation Prize in Science, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2003, a World Technology Network Fellowship in 2004, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2008, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011.