Jungeun Olivia Lee joined the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work in 2014. Prior to her appointment at USC, she was a research scientist at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and Social Development Research Group after receiving her doctoral degree in 2009.
Her program of research centers on the interconnections among substance use, mental health, socioeconomic adversities, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) across the life course and how social and contextual risks fuel or disrupt the interplay. ACEs are highly correlated with socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood and predictive of SES, substance use, and mental health in adulthood. Her work intentionally straddles and integrates three distinct bodies of literature—behavioral health, socioeconomic adversities, and ACEs—generating four distinct but interconnected topic areas: (a) socioeconomic inequalities in substance use and mental health across the life course; (b) socioeconomic adversities and resilience across the life course and generations; (c) life course etiology of substance use; and (d) the effects of ACEs, a strong correlate of SES, across the life course and generations. She is pursuing these topic areas using a range of longitudinal datasets. She has contributed to multiple grants as either a principal investigator or co-investigator with support from multiple agencies, such as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
She serves on the national editorial boards of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research and BMC Public Health. She is an academic advisory board member for the Pacific Southwest region of the Prevention Technology Transfer Center Network. She also sits on the steering committee of the USC Institute for Addiction Science and serves as a co-leader of the Priority Populations and Health Equity Group at the institute. She is a member of the Society for Social Work and Research and the Society for Prevention Research.
Lee is also interested in quantitative methodology for longitudinal data and has expertise in four general areas of advanced statistics: including mixture modeling (often referred to as the “person-centered approach”), structural equation modeling, categorical data analysis, and techniques for handling missing data. 
To reference the work of Jungeun Olivia Lee online, we ask that you directly quote their work where possible and attribute it to “Jungeun Olivia Lee, a faculty member at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work” (LINK: https://dworakpeck.usc.edu).