Sophomore works on research that impacts underserved communities

Sophomore Hedy Lee, in the Ujamaa Residential College lounge, displays some of the concept-mapping research she presented to an American Evaluation Association conference in Hawaii in November. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Susan Lang

Hedwig ("Hedy") Lee is only in her second year at Cornell, but she already: has presented her own research at a national professional meeting; has her name on a scientific publication; is a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course; and is a winner of the Robinson Award for Academic Excellence for the highest freshman grade-point average in the College of Human Ecology.

Research is nothing new to the slender, 6-foot-tall sophomore. A Cornell Presidential Research Scholar and policy analysis and management major, Lee, from Philadelphia, started conducting independent research projects in fourth grade and hasn't let up since. In high school, she not only won four awards, including a gold medal, for her science projects but she also worked for two years, part time, at the Monell Chemical Senses Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She helped test air quality near chemical plants and its effects on health in low-income neighborhoods near those plants.

"One of our tasks was to take gas samples in Camden homes where the air pollution was particularly bad," said Lee. "One home in particular was in shambles. I could feel the hopelessness and isolation this family was feeling and for me, it was a wake-up call. I realized then just what poverty looked like and how important research and academics could be in impacting it."

The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother from St. Croix and an African American father from Philadelphia who met in law school, Lee is strongly grounded in both her ethnic, cultural and community service heritages.

"My father is my role model, and I want to work for my community as he does," she said. Her father, Rotan Lee, is a Philadelphia lawyer who has served as a president of the Philadelphia city school system, as a CEO of Philadelphia Gas and Electric Co., and as a newspaper columnist, all the while being heavily active in his local community.

At Cornell, Lee lives in Ujamaa and is active in the Association of Students of Color, Black Students United and the Africana Graduate Center.

After she earned an A+ in the course Introduction to Management for Not-for-Profit Organizations, Lee was asked by Associate Professor Don Tobias to be a teaching assistant for this year. The course, however, has given her more than an assistantship; she is applying what she learned about concept mapping -- a strategy that allows researchers to group and prioritize a wide array of factors -- to a nutrition problem. Working for Ardyth Gillespie, an associate professor of nutritional sciences who is looking at family and community food decision-making, Lee has been working with Gillespie's 35-member research work team to organize and rank their goals for the research project. The project aims to improve community and family health through better food decisions and a stronger community food system. Lee is trying to identify how the team's leadership skills could be enhanced. Of 52 items identified as part of the group's strategic planning, Lee has identified a subset of six factors that emerged as most important. Lee presented the first phase of her concept-mapping project to the American Evaluation Association annual conference in Hawaii in November, and she was the only undergraduate among the 800 conference presenters.

Lee's senior honors thesis is already taking shape. Having conferred with several government officials on a Caribbean island (she's not ready to say which), Lee is trying to lay the groundwork for a potential project that would allow Cornell researchers to use pattern and concept mapping to align the concerns of the island community and its government to create initiatives resulting in both groups feeling they are being well served.

And after Cornell? Lee has her sights set on study in England with perhaps a Rhodes or Marshall scholarship, law school or maybe a doctorate, or both.

"Either way, I want to give back and do research to help the disadvantaged," she said.