Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D.
Phone: (650) 498-7426
Email:
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D., Senior Research Scholar, is an anthropologist who studies race, ethnicity and culture in science, technology and biomedicine. Her research programme focuses on the social and scientific meanings of race in human genetic variation research and their implications for understandings of human difference. Dr. Lee has conducted a study on the social and ethical issues related to the DNA sampling of human populations and policies around the use of racial taxonomies by publicly funded cell repositories. Her current project entitled, Race and Distributive Justice in Pharmacogenomics Research, which includes a development of an anthropology of racial justice, with a particular focus on health disparities among populations. Dr. Lee is conducting a study of the emerging field of pharmacogenomics and its impact on the health status of historically racialized populations.
Dr. Lee's previous research includes a study of race and ethnicity in contemporary Japan and an analysis of the social identity, aging, and discrimination. The project focused on the meaning of race in an "intra-racial" context, contributing a non-western perspective on the concept. Dr. Lee has also conducted extensive community based research with Asian American, Pacific Islander, Latino/Latina, and African American communities in the Bay area on issues including AIDS prevention, domestic violence, intergenerational support networks, and community based health organizations for the elderly.
Dr. Lee's awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship , National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award , and a National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Career Development Award in Research Ethics . She is also a member of the NHGRI Program in Ethical, Legal, Social Implications Genetic Variation Consortium.
In addition to her research activities, Dr. Lee teaches in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology and the Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity . Her courses include Gender in East Asia, Asian American Immigration and Health, Korean American Diaspora, Race and Medicine. She is also co-organizer of the ongoing Stanford Faculty Workshop "Revisiting Race and Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetics Research" devoted to interdisciplinary dialogue on the social and scientific consequences of human genetic variation research on the study of race and ethnicity.
Dr. Lee recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Program in Genomics, Ethics and Society at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She received her Ph.D. from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. As a graduate student, Dr. Lee studied at Tokyo University, Japan; Yonsei University, South Korea; and Magdalen College, Oxford University, England. Her undergraduate degree is in Human Biology from Stanford University.
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