Jiyoung Lee

Professor, Division of Environmental Health Science and Department of Food Science & Technology, Ohio State University

Dr. Jiyoung Lee is a Professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences, College of Public Health (70%) and the Department of Food Science & Technology (30%) at The Ohio State University. She is a Co-Director of Ecology, Epidemiology & Population Health program at the Infectious Diseases Institute.  

She received her PhD from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and MS and BS from the Department of Microbiology, Seoul National University, Seoul, S. Korea.   

The main theme of her research is tracking microbial contamination in environments that leads to human exposure and its linkage to acute and chronic health outcomes. She directs her Environmental Microbiology & One Health Lab and has studied several areas in Water-Climate-Food nexus, especially cyanobacteria & their toxins, antibiotic resistance (AR) and enteric pathogens. Her recent research has become more translational in understanding the impact of microbial contaminants on host health, such as cyanotoxin exposure on cancers and neurogenerative diseases in the US and S. Korea, and infant gut microbiome development in developing countries. During COVID-19 pandemic, her lab started research on tracking SARS-CoV-2 infection in communities and predicting COVID-19 cases using wastewater-based epidemiology and machine learning tools.

Dr. Lee has advised ten Postdoctoral Researchers and more than forty PhD and Master students in her lab, and has mentored numerous assistant professors, visiting scholars & professors, research staff, and undergraduate students.  She has received Distinguished Junior Faculty Research Award and Plimpton Outstanding Teacher Award from the Ohio State University.