Ka Yee Christina Lee came to the United States for her undergraduate education at Brown University. After graduating with honors and magna cum laude in Electrical Engineering in 1986, she attended Harvard University and obtained her master (1987) and doctorate (1992) degrees in Applied Physics. She did her first postdoctoral training at Stanford in the Department of Chemistry, and her second at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1998, Dr. Lee has been at Chicago is currently an Associate Professor of the Department of Chemistry, the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, the James Franck Institute, and the College at the University of Chicago, and her research focus is on biophysical chemistry. Dr. Lee has received numerous national awards, including the 1998 Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, the Searle Scholar Award, and the March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award. She was honored as a David and Lucile Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering in 1999 and a Sloan Research Fellow in 2001, and she was named a Senior Fellow for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in 2006, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. Dr. Lee was awarded the 1999 Ruth Salta Junior Investigator Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research by the American Health Assistance Foundation, the 2001 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award by the Biophysical Society, and most recently the 2009 Astrella USA Foundation Award administered by the American Chemical Society. Dr. Lee is very involved with undergraduate teaching and strongly supports undergraduate research. She teaches general chemistry and physical chemistry courses at the College and a graduate course in Biophysical Chemistry, and her laboratory routinely includes undergraduate as well as high school researchers. She was the recipient of the 2002 J. & J. Neubauer Faculty Development Fellowship for Innovative and Effective Teaching given by The College, the 2005 Outstanding Support of Undergraduate Research Award from the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium, and was most recently honored with the 2007 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She has also been recognized by Crain’s Chicago Business as one of the up and coming Chicagoans and was the recipient of the “40 Under 40” Award in 1999. Dr. Lee is married to Dr. Thuong G. Van Ha, who is on the faculty of Interventional Radiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and is the mother of three kids Quôc Trung Nigel (11), Quôc Trinh Elizabeth (9), and Quôc Thanh Ethan (6).
