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Professor and Head
University of Connecticut
Ji-Young Lee is currently Head and Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She is also a Fellow of the American Heart Association as well as the American College of Nutrition. Lee was the recipient of the first Korean Nutrition Society Award selected by the American Society for Nutrition in 2011. Also, she was the recipient of the 2019 Excellence in Research Award by the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources at UConn. She has been actively engaged in grant reviews for the National Institute of Health and American Heart Association and has been serving on editorial boards for several journals, notably the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry and Journal of Medicinal Food.
For the past 15 years of Lee’s academic career as a faculty member, she has secured competitive funding from federal agencies, such as the National Institute of Health and the US Department of Agriculture, Connecticut Department of Public Health, industry, research foundations, and commodity boards. Lee’s research focuses on the identification of molecular mediators that are involved in energy metabolism and inflammatory/fibrogenic signaling pathways; and how dietary factors, such as blue-green algae, berries, carotenoids, and NAD precursors, play regulatory roles therein. Specifically, Lee is interested in linking energy metabolism to inflammatory/fibrogenic signaling pathways using state of the art molecular techniques and bioenergetics tools in cell and animal models. Recently, she is using cell type-specific deletion of class II histone deacetylases, including histone deacetylase 4 and 9, to determine their role in metabolic, inflammatory, and fibrogenic pathways in the setting of obesity or alcohol consumption.