Hedwig (Hedy) Lee

Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her BS in Policy Analysis from Cornell University in 2003 and her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health from 2009 to 2011. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Research on Demography and Ecology and Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.

She is broadly interested in the social determinants and consequences of population health and health disparities, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity, poverty, race-related stress, and the family. Hedy’s research draws from multiple sources of data to investigate these relationships, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Chicago Community Adult Health Study, National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, National Health Interview Survey, National Survey of American Life, and Twitter. Hedy is very interested in engaging in interdisciplinary research and has published and worked with scholars across a wide range of fields including sociology, demography, psychology, political science, public health and medicine.

Her recent work examines the impact of family member incarceration on the health and attitudes of family members, association between discrimination and mental and physical health, documenting trends in racial/ethnic health disparities, socioeconomic causes and consequences of obesity in childhood and adolescence, and using social media data for demographic and  health research. Hedy currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on topics related to racial/ethnic health disparities and the social determinants of population health.