GCAHR welcomes Dr. Sun-Kyung Lee as newest member

The Global Center for Applied Health Research (GCAHR) is proud to welcome the newest member of the team, Dr. Sun-Kyung Lee. She will be working as an assistant research professor after completing her postdoc in REACH institute at ASU. She first earned her Masters in Educational Measurement and Statistics from Korea University in Seoul, Korea and her Ph.D. in Family Science, specialized in Prevention Science, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

According to Lee, she is most excited about research on families and helping families who are underserved or hard to reach. She describes how her work in undergraduate with the United Nations instilled her with a desire to do the research required to help families in need.

She realized the work they were doing in their “big, luxury, meetings” was not reaching the everyday struggles of families. These communities needed more research to better advocate for their needs.

“That sounds more like what I can do,” she said as she described how she became interested in research on families.

Lee has explored how evidence-based parenting programs can improve mental health outcomes of both parents and children, as well as reviewing literature on parenting programs for Southeast Asian families and in languages other than English to identify gaps in resources and needs.

She began her work over the summer at the GCAHR with the center’s ongoing programs such as Keeping it REAL which has been expanded to include Native (P2W) and Latin American (Mantente REAL) populations. Lee is hoping to continue this expansion so that programs can be brought to other communities around the globe.

Lee shared that she was drawn to GCAHR because of their research on social determinants of health, and their work on dissemination and implementation of evidence-based programs for underserved families and youth.

She described that “the work the center has been doing is really focusing not just for the Hispanic or Latino families in the U.S., but now it's expanding to more international groups like Africa and Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay.”

Outside of her professional career, Lee enjoys travel, photography and describes the best part of her day is “playing with my little one.” She loves taking road trips up and down the U.S., learning new languages, and swimming and singing with her 1-year-old.

Learn more about the GCAHR research projects and faculty by visiting our website.