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Dr. Hee Yun Lee is the Thomas P. Holland Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organizations at the University of Georgia School of Social Work. Her scholarship focuses on digital health and behavioral health and innovation to advance health equity for underserved populations, and she leads interdisciplinary teams spanning medicine, public health, engineering, and psychology.

Over the past two decades, she has designed, tested, and implemented technology-enhanced interventions—including AI-enabled and mobile tools—across cancer prevention and screening, mental health, dementia caregiver support, substance use, and health literacy. Her work emphasizes community-engaged, translational research with nonprofit and clinical partners, moving evidence from trials into real-world practice and policy. She has led and collaborated on numerous federally funded projects (e.g., NIH, HRSA, NSF, CDC, SAMHSA, U.S. Department of Education), while mentoring trainees and junior/mid-career faculty.

She has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and frequently delivers invited talks nationally and internationally. She was recently Included in Elsevier’s Stanford-compiled database of the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in Public Health (Ioannidis et al., 2025 update). She remains committed to cross-sector partnerships—particularly between social work and medicine—to develop scalable, culturally responsive digital solutions that enhance equity and improve population health.

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