Assistant Professor of Biology Amy Si-Ying Lee was named a 2017 Searle Scholar, receiving $300,000 in flexible funding to support her work over the next three years. Lee’s research is focused on discovering how gene regulation occurs through novel mechanisms of mRNA translation. Specifically, her lab studies how non-canonical translation pathways shape cell growth and differentiation, and why defects in mRNA translation lead to developmental disorders and cancer.
Lee, who came to Brandeis in Summer 2016, has a PhD form Harvard and did her postdoc at UC Berkeley. She has also been awarded a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship and in January won the Charles H. Hood Foundation Child Health Research Award. Lee’s lab is up and running and recruiting postdocs and PhD students (through the Molecular & Cell Biology and Biochemistry & Biophysics graduate programs). In Fall 2017, Lee will teach BIOL 105, Molecular Biology.
