Three new faculty members of the UGA School of Social Work will serve as an interdisciplinary bridge to the UGA School of Medicine. Professor Hee Yun Lee will hold a joint appointment with the School of Medicine’s Department of Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences and Associate Professors Karen Johnson and Sharon Parker have been granted courtesy appointments in the School of Medicine’s Department of Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences.
Dr. Hee Yun Lee is Thomas P. Holland Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organizations and will serve as the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Social Work, Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences, and Associate Director in the Digital Health Division of the emerging Research Institute within the School of Medicine. She will work collaboratively with Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Professor Dr. Yana Zavros, who will direct the Research Institute to generate external funding and mentor the four faculty who will be hired into the Digital Health Division through the 2025-2026 Presidential Hiring Initiative (PHI). This collaboration is pivotal for supporting the University’s Precision One Health strategies, development, and growth. The grand vision of this collaboration is to view translational research as the process of obtaining laboratory, clinical and/or community findings for the development of interventions that will improve the health of patients and the public. Through a multidisciplinary approach that leverages the breadth of research excellence across colleges, units, centers and institutes at UGA, scientific discoveries are transformed into diagnostics and therapeutics, medical procedures and devices and behavioral changes that impact human health and medicine.
Dr. Sharon Parker is an Associate Professor at the UGA School of Social Work. She received a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MSW from the University of Pittsburgh, and an M.S. in Adult Education from North Carolina A&T State University. Parker completed her post-doctoral fellowship at the School of Medicine Department of Infectious Diseases / The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Parker is a health disparities researcher who examines the structural, social, behavioral, and biological factors that influence the transmission of infectious diseases, with a primary focus on HIV among African Americans and other vulnerable populations. She examines the interconnectedness of HIV, concurrent sexual relationships, substance abuse, intimate partner violence, and gender inequality among criminal justice-involved individuals and other high-risk populations. For several years, she has been engaged in randomized control trials funded by the NIH and the CDC. She engages in a multidisciplinary approach in the areas of both research and clinical practice. Translational research is incorporated into her work in order to improve the health outcomes of vulnerable populations. Dr. Parker is engaged in biomedical research examining the use of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) with men who have sex with men (MSM) and heterosexual women to reduce the transmission of HIV among high-risk populations.
Dr. Johnson is an Associate Professor at the UGA School of Social Work and a Visiting Scholar at Yale University. She was recognized as a 2023 Boston Congress of Public Health “Health Innovator to Watch” and received the 2024 “Early Career Faculty Service and Leadership in Social Work Education Award” from the Council on Social Work Education. Dr. Johnson holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and completed postdoctoral training in Global Mental Health and Implementation Science at Columbia University, and HIV Implementation Science at Johns Hopkins University. She serves as Co-Associate Director of Community Sciences for The University of Alabama at Birmingham Center for AIDS Research and is an affiliate with the Columbia University School of Social Work Social Intervention Group. Her research focuses on HIV/STI prevention and intervention among criminal legal system-involved populations and those in other social determinants of health systems of care, emphasizing sexual health and evidence-based intervention development and implementation. With over 20 years of direct practice experience, Dr. Johnson’s work is inspired by the challenges she encountered early in her career across various practice settings trying to implement evidence-based practices. With funding from sources such as the National Institutes of Health through the University of Alabama at Birmingham Center for AIDS Research, the Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Maria Holder Foundation, the New York State Office of Mental Health, and Alabama Transportation Institute, she is dedicated to bridging education, research, and practice gaps. Dr. Johnson has worked with populations facing high rates of incarceration, houselessness, substance use, and sexually transmitted infection transmission. Building on this foundation, she currently leads five active implementation science studies, all of which focus on improving the health and well-being of racially and other minoritized populations.
