Lee Sanders, MD, MPH

Dr. Lee Sanders is a general pediatrician and Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at Stanford University, where he serves as the Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Dr. Sanders teaches undergraduate and graduate students in the Human Biology Program, in Health Policy and at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford d.School). A national expert in health literacy, Dr. Sanders applies a literacy lens to advance maternal and child health equity. He directs the Stanford Health Literacy Lab, which addresses child health and educational disparities through innovative redesigns of primary care involving youth and families. Recognized as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar, he leads foundational research in health literacy to enhance maternal and child health outcomes.

Dr. Sanders has advised numerous prestigious organizations, including the NIH, CDC, FDA, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. He leads a multi-disciplinary research team that provides analytic guidance to policymakers at various levels, focusing on improving care for children with medical complexity (CMC) through health-services research and human-centered design. As Principal Investigator on multiple federally funded studies, Dr. Sanders explores the efficacy of AI-driven behavioral interventions, including the Greenlight Study Team, which has developed an efficacious, AI-driven platform to prevent early childhood obesity, and GoalKeeper, an AI-driven tool to advance care coordination in chronic-illness care. He collaborates with the Graduate School of Education on a unique virtual birth cohort, linking health and educational data to address child health disparities; with the Immigration Policy Lab on research to understand the impact of immigration policy on child health; and with Biomedical Data Sciences, on AI-driven platforms that apply computer-vision algorithms to improve relational health. Dr. Sanders earned a BA in History and Science from Harvard University, an MD from Stanford University, and an MPH from the University of California, Berkeley.

Previously, he was on faculty at the University of Miami, where he directed the Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity, and served as Medical Director for Children’s Medical Services South Florida, coordinating care for over 10,000 low-income children with special health care needs. Since returning to Stanford, he has held several leadership roles, including Co-director for the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention, which conducts health services research and digital health research in primary care, and Co-director of the Family Advocacy Program, which addresses social determinants of community health. Fluent in Spanish, Dr. Sanders co-directs the Complex Primary Care Clinic at Stanford Children’s Health, providing multi-disciplinary care for children with complex chronic conditions. Outside of his professional life, he is a father of two daughters who remind him to listen more and talk less.