About Dr. Lee

Dr. Hae Yeon Lee is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on the development of mindsets and lay theories about the social world that influences youths’ and young adults’ psychological resilience and social-emotional wellbeing.

In 2008, she earned a B.A. in Psychology (with summa cum laude) from Seoul National University in South Korea– her home country where she was born and raised for the first two and half decades of her life. She then earned her M.A. (2015) and Ph.D. (2019) in Developmental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin under the mentorship of Dr. David Yeager. During her doctoral training, she led an NICHD-funded, multi-site school field longitudinal intervention study aimed at understanding adolescents’ psychosocial stress, resilience, and social-emotional experiences during the high school transition years. Using this large-scale, school field RCT trial data, she examines the efficacy of teaching a growth mindset of personality intervention at scale in terms of altering adolescents’ daily stress appraisals, emotions, and health, as well as their enduring effects on social-emotional wellness. The Texas Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Stress Resilience and Health (TLSASR) dataset has been published on the ICPSR DAIRL platform.

Upon graduation, she joined Stanford University, Department of Psychology as a postdoctoral research scholar continuing to expand her independent research program under the joint mentorship of Dr. Gregory Walton and Dr. Carol Dweck. There, she has investigated the long-term enduring effects of a social belonging intervention on college students’ physical health and social-emotional wellness, while exploring treatment effects heterogeneity through understanding the role of parent beliefs and mindsets. In January 2021, Dr. Lee joined Yale-NUS College in Singapore as an Assistant Professor of Psychology, teaching and researching adolescent development, psychological interventions, and research design and methods. Since July 2022, she is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, Department of Psychology, with a joint appointment at Yale-NUS College.

Dr. Lee’s research program bridges social-cognitive development with affective health science to understand adolescents’ status sensitivity and its developmental implications for stress resilience, motivation, behavior, and mental and physical health outcomes. Particularly, Dr. Lee is interested in how young people mentally construe the social world (their beliefs, mindsets, and lay theories) and how their beliefs and mindsets can shape the ways in which they respond to socially “stressful” experiences. To explore these questions, Dr. Lee’s research program integrates wise psychological intervention approaches with ecological measures and methods (i.e., ecological momentary assessments, social behavioral tasks, hormone sampling, and large-scale institutional data) in laboratory and school field contexts. The central aims of her work are to advance theoretical understandings of the development of mindset and resilience from a broader human development perspective. Dr. Lee also hopes to create effective psychological intervention programs that can inspire parents, youths, and educators to promote psychosocial resilience and healthier development in diverse school and cultural contexts.

To date, Dr. Hae Yeon Lee’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including Child Development, Psychological Science, Development and Psychopathology, Developmental Science, and Emotion Review. Her doctoral dissertation won the 2018 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) dissertation funding award. In 2019, Dr. Lee was named a Jacobs Foundation Young Scholar. Her research findings have been featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, The Conversation, Future Ed, Education Week, Daily Texan, Fox News, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

See Dr. Lee’s profile at Google Scholar and Research Gate. Click below to view Dr. Lee’s latest CV.