Richard M. Lee, Ph.D. is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He was the Melvin and Gertrude Waldfogel Scholar of the College for 2020-2023 and served as the Director of the the Asian American Studies Program from 2022-2024.
Dr. Lee’s research focuses broadly on the cultural, racial, ethnic, and migration experiences of youth and families from racially minoritized backgrounds. He is specifically interested in how Asian youth and families in the United States and overseas in other countries individually and collectively experience and respond to living in a racialized environment, focusing on determinants and outcomes of ethnic-racial identity development, acculturation and acculturative stress, racism and discrimination, ethnic-racial socialization, and culture-specific parenting across generations. To do this work, he employ top-down and bottom-up approaches to quantitative and qualitative research. He is increasingly drawn toward a more interdisciplinary, international, and collaborative approach to doing this work.
Professor Lee was born and raised in Connecticut. He is the youngest of three sons raised by immigrant parents from South Korea. He is a first-generation college student and attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Boston College (B.A.), and Virginia Commonwealth University (Ph.D.), followed by a predoctoral internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. He previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin before moving to Minnesota in 2000.
Professor Lee is a fellow of APA Division 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) and Division 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race) and the Asian American Psychological Association. He is a founding member of the Asian Caucus (chair 2019-2021) of the Society for Research on Child Development and a founding member of the Diversity Committee of the Society for Research on Adolescence. From 2011-2013, he served as President of the Asian American Psychological Association. He is a past Editor for Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (2015-2019). His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Balancing work and personal life is important. Outside of Elliott Hall (home of the Department of Psychology), Professor Lee enjoys cooking, watching sports (especially the Timberwolves), karaoke with friends, local arts events, outdoors activities (camping, canoeing, and fishing), playing sports with his boys, and spending his evenings with his family (i.e., not doing work). He lives in Minneapolis with his wife who is an assistant professor in the genetic counseling program, two teenage sons, his artist father, two cats, and one dog.
FamiLee Lab is named in honor of his parents who owned FamiLee Cleaners and Tailors in CT for many years. Below is his academic family tree. It lists Prof Lee’s advisor, his advisor’s advisor, and so on. If you follow the academic lineage of most psychology professors, it almost always goes back to people like William James and Wilhelm Wundt. And if you research these scholars, you will see that Harold Pepinsky graduated from the University of Minnesota and Gilbert Wrenn and Walter Cook (Pepinsky’s advisors) were professors at the University of Minnesota. Nevertheless, it’s a lot of white men! But it’s always good to disrupt history and the field. Come join the FamiLee Lab!
