Jong-koo Lee
Professor of Family Medicine, Seoul National University College of Medicine (Korea)
Dr. Jong-koo Lee is currently a Professor of Family Medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine. He was director and founder of the Center for Jong-woo Lee’s Global Medicine, launched in 2012. He is in charge of undergraduate and graduate education and research for Family Medicine/Primary Health Care and public health policies on global health, and he also is in charge of infectious epidemiology at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Health.
During his service as a government official he developed various programs and systems for primary health care and renewed public health programs in Korea. He was the director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 to 2011. He developed surveillance programs for chronic disease, including the National Health Examination and Nutrition Survey, promoted R&D on chronic diseases, and set up the Bio-Bank and National Medical Library of Korea. He has served in various positions of the Ministry of Health and Welfare in the Korean Government. He was the Director General of the Bureau of Health Promotion and Public Health Affairs from 2004 to 2007, where he launched a health promotion program which included raising the tobacco tax and supporting the tobacco control program. During this time he also supported community programs on health promotion and disease prevention, such as screening programs, health city initiatives, a capacity building program for health workers in community health centers, and a National Cancer Prevention Plan. Prior to this role he was in charge of infectious disease control and quarantine services, immunization programs, infectious disease surveillance, and field epidemiology training programs (EIS Officer in Korea). In 2011 completed 23 years of service with the government and joined the University.
Lee is a graduate of Seoul National University College of Medicine, where he studied Family Medicine. He received an MPH in epidemiology from the Graduate School of Public Health at Seoul National University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management from the Graduate School of Medicine in 2003. From 2011 to 2014, he was Vice-President of Policy and Development at Seoul National University Hospital. In June 2020 he was nominated ambassador for Global Health Security.