Career
Lee graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. [4] That same year, she married Victor Ambros, who was at that time a PhD student at MIT. [5]
Lee began working as a research assistant in Victor Ambros' lab in 1987. Her work on the cloning of lin-4 began in January, 1989, in Ambros's lab at Harvard University, and she was joined on the project in the fall of 1989 by Rhonda Feinbaum, a postdoc. [6] [7] Lee and Feinbaum worked for a couple of years in a labor-intensive search for a gene behind a mutation. [8] What they eventually discovered was microRNA, [9] adding a new mechanism for gene regulation. [10] [11] The 1993 paper was soon accepted for publication, and in a change of journal policy, it was published with a notice on the front page that it was jointly first-authored by Lee and Feinbaum, [6] clarifying that both contributed equally to the research. [12] In a 2004 paper, Lee, Feinbaum and Ambros describe how they eventually wrote up the work in 1993, and submitted it to the journal Cell , in parallel with a related paper by Gary Ruvkun. [6]
Lee's co-authored 1993 paper is widely regarded as the seminal contribution in the discovery of microRNA, for which her husband Ambros and Ruvkun were both awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024. [3] The Nobel announcement provoked interest into the question of why Lee hadn't also been recognized with the award. [12]
As of 2024, Lee is a Senior Scientist, in Program in Molecular Medicine, Dr. Victor Ambros's Molecular Medicine Laboratory, at UMass Chan Medical School. [13]
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