Charles Lee

Dr. Lee received his doctoral degree from the University of Alberta, Canada in 1996 and was subsequently a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) research fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK from 1996-1998.  He then completed his Clinical Cytogenetics fellowship at Harvard Medical School, USA from 1998-2001, and subsequently became board certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics in Clinical Cytogenetics in 2002. 

Dr. Lee is currently the Director of Cytogenetics for the Harvard Cancer Center, Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Faculty Member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Broad Institute. He is also cross-appointed as an adjunct Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Dr. Lee has authored over 100 publications in top journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and Nature Genetics. Of the committees that he currently serves on, Dr. Lee is a regular member of the Genes, Health and Development Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, Chair of the American Society of Human Genetics Program Committee, Co-chair of the structural genomic variation analysis group for the 1000 genome project (www.1000genomes.org) and Associate Editor for the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Among the awards that Dr. Lee has received, he received postdoctoral fellowship awards from both the Medical Research Council of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and in 2007, he received the Inaugural Team Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) for "the landmark discovery of recurrent gene fusions in prostate cancer"

In 2004, Dr. Lee's laboratory initially reported widespread structural variation (in the form of copy number variants - CNVs) in the human genome (Nat Genet 36: 949, 2004) and subsequently published a CNV map for the human genome (Nature 444: 444, 2006). In 2007, Science magazine announced human genetic variation as the breakthrough of the year and in 2008, at the age of 39, Dr. Lee became the youngest recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in Medicine (also referred to as the "Korean Nobel Prize") for his pioneering work in this field.