The authors would like to express our gratitude to the KSTAR team for their assistance in conducting the experiment for simulation and validation studies. The authors also thank Dr. C. Holland in UCSD for allowing and providing synthetic diagnostic code for CGYRO output. This study was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2020R1F1A1076162), and the R&D Program of the KSTAR Experimental Collaboration and Fusion Plasma Research (EN2201-13). Computing resources were provided on the National Supercomputing Center with supercomputing resources including technical support (KSC-2020-CRE-0364) and on the KFE computer KAIROS, funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of the Republic of Korea (KFE-EN2241). Part of the data analysis was performed using the OMFIT integrated modeling framework.