Virginia Man-Yee Lee, PhD

Virginia Lee is the Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR), the John H. Ware 3rd Professor in Alzheimer’s Research, and Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California San Francisco as well as an MBA from the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lee founded CNDR in 2002, which is comprised of technicians, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows that investigate age-related proteinopathies. She encourages and facilitates a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to study the underlying pathological mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease with a focus on drug discovery. Dr. Lee’s contributions to science have warranted several honors and awards throughout her career. She was recognized as one of the most highly cited neuroscientists from 1981-1997 with the ISI Highly Cited Researcher award in 2000, and was among the top 5 most cited neuroscientists for the following 10 years. Dr. Lee was also awarded the 2009 Alzheimer’s Association Life Time Achievement Award. She recently received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her work in age-related neurodegenerative research. She has more than 870 publications and an h-index of 150. Dr. Lee continues to research neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s through various NIH-funded projects.