Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD is Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities & Ethics with tenure at Columbia University. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Dr. Lee has extensive experience leading multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional bioethics research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including Just Inclusion and Equity: Negotiating Community-Research Partnerships in Genomics Research (1R01 HG12841-01), Ethics of Inclusion: Diversity in Precision Medicine Research (1R01HG010330), and Beyond Consent: Patient Preferences for Governance of Use of Clinical Samples and Data (1R01LM012180). Dr. Lee recently served on the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on the Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry as Population Descriptors in Genomics Research that produced guidelines for NIH.

Dr. Lee is Co-PI of the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA)/ELSIhub funded by the NIH/NHGRI and was Co-Director of the 2020, 2022 and 2024 ELSI Congress. Dr. Lee is a member of the US Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) and serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, NIH funded Human Pangenome Research Consortium, and the Genome Canada funded Canada First Research Excellence Fund Program DNA to RNA: An Inclusive Canadian Approach to Genomic-based RNA Therapeutics (D2R).

Dr. Lee has served as President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD) and as co-chair of the ABPD Presidential Task Force on Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. She serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics and on the Editorial Advisory Committee for the American College of Medical Genetics Journals Genetics in Medicine and Genetics in Medicine Open. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the Humanities, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow, a University of Edinburgh Bright Ideas Fellow, and a Fellow at the School for Advanced Research.

Dr. Lee has mentored over 30 trainees and early career and tenure track faculty. At Columbia, Dr. Lee co-leads the NIH funded Justice Dialogues, serves as Chair of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions and is Director of the Team Science Program at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Dr. Lee received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco (UCB/UCSF) joint program in Medical Anthropology and her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University.