Dr. Rhee is a Professor of Pediatrics at UC San Diego/Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego with special interest in childhood eating and weight related disorders. Dr. Rhee earned her bachelor’s degree in human biology and master’s in sociology at Stanford University before earning her medical degree at Temple University School of Medicine. After completing her pediatric residency and chief residency at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, she went on to complete an academic general pediatrics fellowship at Boston Medical Center, with a focus on childhood obesity. While there, she earned her MSc in epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Dr. Rhee conducts investigations into the behavioral, cognitive and biologic factors contributing to the development and management of childhood obesity. Her multidisciplinary training in pediatric hospital medicine, childhood obesity, eating disorders, behavior modification and therapy, parent-child interactions, parenting skills training, motivational interviewing, epidemiology, and social psychology enable her success in this work. Her research focuses on identifying novel targets for obesity prevention and treatment including, parenting styles, parent feeding behaviors, child eating behaviors, executive functioning, genetic and epigenetic influences, and gut peptides and the microbiome.
In addition to her research activities, Dr. Rhee is also the Medical Director of the Medical Behavioral Unit/Eating Disorder Unit at Rady Children’s Hospital where she focuses on the multidisciplinary treatment of patients with anorexia, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), binge eating disorder, food-related phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder, failure to thrive, and other nutrition related illnesses. Dr. Rhee has three children, enjoys traveling and cooking, and secretly thinks about starting a catering company or a restaurant someday.