Jeannie T. Lee PhD, MD

Jeannie T. Lee is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is also Co-Director of the Harvard Epigenetics Initiative. Dr. Lee specializes in the study of epigenetic regulation by long noncoding RNAs and employs X-chromosome inactivation as a model system.

For her work on RNA-mediated chromatin change, Dr. Lee became the recipient of the 2010 Molecular Biology Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was named a Distinguished Graduate Award of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

She received her A.B. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University, obtained M.D.-Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and did postgraduate training at the Whitehead Institute/MIT and at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She was also a Basil O’Connor Scholar and a Pew Scholars, and, until recently, served on the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America. In 2011, she co-founded RaNA Therapeutics to harness the potential of long noncoding RNAs to treat disease.