Dr. Rhee is a Professor of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Chief of the Divisions of Child and Community Health, and Adolescent Medicine, and the Medical Director of the inpatient eating disorder unit at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego Medical Behavioral Unit and the UCSD Center for Healthy Eating and Activity Research (CHEAR). She has special interest in childhood eating and weight related disorders and has multidisciplinary training in family-based behavioral therapy, parenting skills training (Incredible Years Program), motivational interviewing, epidemiology, and social psychology. She has been federally funded by NIH, USDA, and HRSA since 2009 to conduct research on the intersection of biology, cognition, and behavior and how this affects child development and health. She specifically conducts research on the behavioral, cognitive and biologic factors contributing to the development and management of childhood obesity. Her work focuses on identifying novel targets for obesity prevention and treatment including, parenting styles, parent feeding behaviors, child eating behaviors, executive functioning, gut peptides and the microbiome. Over the past several years, her work has expanded to include social determinants of health targets and food insecurity. She currently directs 2 studies evaluating the impact of delivering nutrition incentives to food insecure Latino families in Southern CA (that is funded by the USDA Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program). She has also implemented a fruit and veggie prescription program at RCHSD for low-income families with children with Type 2 Diabetes.
In addition to her research, Dr. Rhee is the Medical Director of the Center for Healthy Eating and Activity Research and Rady Children’s Hospital’s inpatient Medical Behavioral Unit and coordinates the services of a broad range of providers including psychologists, dieticians, case managers, and financial managers in the care of children with eating related diseases. She also serves as Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Department of Pediatrics and works to develop policies and trainings that promote equity for underserved communities and underrepresented minorities. She is deeply committed to the promotion of child health in diverse communities, and is participating in a multi-disciplinary collaboration to develop an intervention with the FQHC of San Diego that addresses ACES and the social determinants of health needs of families in their clinics. Dr. Rhee also serves as the Associate Director of the Master Clinician Program in the Center for Mentorship in Medicine, Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion and directs research activities to study the impact of these mentoring programs on physician and trainee well-being. Throughout her work, she strives to support faculty and trainees in their clinical and scholarly development, and creates policies that promote equity and inclusion for underserved communities and underrepresented minorities.