ReachMD

Dr. Lee Sanders is a general pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He graduated Harvard University with a degree in the history of science, and he completed both medical school and residency training at Stanford University. In 2000, he completed a general pediatrics fellowship at Stanford, which included training in clinical and social epidemiology at University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley.

As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Class of 2007, Dr. Sanders' scholarship focused on the role of health literacy in addressing child health disparities. He is evaluating interdisciplinary efforts to integrate low-literacy, patient-centered platforms for health promotion with health information systems such as electronic medical records and patient health records and community organizations, like schools. He helped develop and validate a new tool to measure parent health literacy. Dr. Sanders' research is currently focused on early-childhood obesity and expanded newborn screening.

Recently, Dr. Sanders received his first National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 funding as a co-investigator on a multi-site randomized clinical trial to assess the efficacy of a low-literacy intervention in pediatric resident clinics to promote healthy lifestyles and reduce childhood obesity. Dr. Sanders also serves on the leadership team for the NIH contract recently awarded to the University of Miami to direct the National Children's Study across the four participating counties in Florida.

At the national level, Dr. Sanders serves in leadership positions with the Academic Pediatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Reach Out and Read. At the state level, he is medical director for Reach Out and Read Florida, an evidence-based program that provides books and early-literacy promotion to more than 160,000 underserved children through more than 170 medical sites. He also serves as a county medical director for Florida's Children's Medical Services, a federally funded program that coordinates care for children with special health care needs. At the University of Miami, Dr. Sanders co-directs the Student Pathway in Social Medicine, a training initiative of the Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity.