Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD, is Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics with tenure at Columbia University. Dr. Lee is a medical anthropologist with extensive experience leading multi-disciplinary bioethics research on race, ancestry and equity in genomics, precision medicine and artificial intelligence; governance of biorepositories and commercialization of biotechnology; and diversity in academic medicine and entrepreneurship. Her projects include The Ethics of Inclusion: Diversity in Precision Medicine Research (R01 HG010330), Beyond Consent: Patient Preferences for Governance of Use of Clinical Samples and Data (R01 LM012180) and Social Networking and Personal Genomics: Implications for Health Research (R01 HG005086). Dr. Lee publishes broadly in the genomics, medical, bioethics, and social science literatures, and co-edited Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (2008), which resulted from a two year multi-disciplinary, cross-campus dialogue supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Stanford Humanities Institute. Dr. Lee is Co-PI of the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA) funded by the NIH/NHGRI, a collaboration between Columbia and Stanford with partners at the Hastings Center and Harvard University. Dr. Lee is also the Co-Director of the NIH/NHGRI funded biennial International ELSI Congress.

Dr. Lee is President of The Association of Bioethics Program Directors(link is external and opens in a new window) and a Hastings Center Fellow. She has been an Economic and Social Research Council Bright Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Wenner-Gren Foundation Faculty Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Medical Humanities and a Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research. Dr. Lee has served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry as Population Descriptors in Genomics Research and as Chairperson of the Institutional Review Board at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California and on the NIH/NHGRI Coriell Consultation and Oversight Committee of the International Haplotype Map. Dr. Lee currently serves on both the Scientific and Bioethics Advisory Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, the NIH Human Pangenome Research Consortium, and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, and the Editorial Advisory Committee for the American College of Medical Genetics Journals. Dr. Lee received her doctorate from the UC Berkeley/UCSF joint Ph.D program in Medical Anthropology and her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University.