Sulggi Lee, MD, PhD
Sulggi Lee, MD PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a faculty member in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine. She also serves as an attending physician at the San Francisco General Hospital inpatient infectious diseases and HIV consult service and in the Ward 86 HIV Clinic. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in human biology from Stanford University, she received her MD/PhD degree from the University of Southern California in genetic epidemiology. She completed her internal medicine residency training at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Infectious Diseases fellowship training at UCSF.
Dr. Lee’s research focuses on identifying underlying mechanisms of host-pathogen infectious diseases pathophysiology (e.g., HIV and COVID) leveraging patient samples from observational and clinical trials and applying high throughput genetic and immunologic assays. Her research includes studying host-specific drug responses to interventions using pharmacokinetic/ pharmacodynamic modeling as well as identifying genetic and immunologic signatures that predict unique clinical phenotypes.
Dr. Lee is the PI of UCSF Treat Acute HIV cohort, which provides immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) to newly diagnosed acute HIV individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, PI of the Effect of Methamphetamine on Residual Latent HIV Disease (EMRLHD) cohort, Co-PI of the UCSF SCOPE HIV cohort, which includes over 2,500 HIV+ infected participants, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed the acute COVID-19 Host Immune Response Pathogenesis (CHIRP) cohort. Her current funding includes an NIH NIAID R01 grant to explore the mechanisms by which interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β)/IL-6 signaling drives systemic inflammation during chronic treated HIV disease, an NIH NIDA R61/R33 award to evaluate the host immune response to methamphetamine use and how it contributes to HIV persistence, and a recent NIAID R56/R01 award to determine the host immune responses driving early viral control during acute treated HIV.