Seung Hee Lee - Korean chef, cookbook writer, pop-up guru, nutritionist, and avid wine lover. These identities come together in her Instagram account, @koreanfusion, and in her acclaimed book, Everyday Korean, which she co-authored with Kim Sunee, a former Southern Living editor and food writer.

Her vision of Korean-Fusion stemmed from wanting to merge her knowledge of traditional ways of Korean cooking with her boundless creativity and inspirations from travels. Trained in Korean Royal Court cuisine, Chef Seung Hee’s cooking adapts traditional Korean recipes to modern kitchens to introduce Korean flavors to everyday home cooks. Fresh-food markets and seasonality factor strongly into her cuisine. She relies on the best local ingredients to give her dishes, many of which she learned from her grandmother in Korea, a contemporary feel. Far from “authentic” but rather, to be inclusive and accessible, personal, robust, and satisfying. Her sensibilities toward texture and flavor layers are lauded by gourmets around the globe.

Seung Hee studied traditional Korean cuisine at the Taste of Korea Research Institute in her homeland before moving to the United States in 2008 to enroll at Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a PhD in Human Nutrition. Her parents, both academics, were not keen on her becoming a chef. But having a PhD from Johns Hopkins and as a working epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Seung Hee is far from your typical chef!