Heewook Lee

Heewook Lee

Assistant professor
PhD, computer science, Indiana University, 2015

Areas of expertise and bio

Expertise: Computational biology

Heewook Lee joins ASU from Carnegie Mellon University where he has been a Lane Fellow in the Computational Biology Department of the School of Computer Science for the past four years.

“I chose to come to ASU because of its fantastic collaborative environment for multidisciplinary researchers,” says Lee. 

Lee’s current research efforts are toward developing computational techniques to study regulatory elements in the immune system.

“This is particularly important because such understanding can lead to new ways to treat cancer or autoimmune patients,” says Lee.

As a Lane Fellow at Carnegie Mellon, he worked on developing novel assembly algorithms for reconstructing highly diverse immune-related genes, including human leukocyte antigens.

Lee received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Columbia University and obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Indiana University. Prior to graduate studies, he worked as a bioinformatics scientist at a sequencing center and genomics company where he was in charge of the computational unit responsible for carrying out various microbial genome projects and the Korean Human Genome project.

This semester, Lee will be teaching CSE 355: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science, and, in the future, a course on computational biology.

“CSE 355 is a core class for all computer science undergraduate majors and it is a foundation course that paves a way to have a deeper understanding of computation,” says Lee. “My future course in computational biology will be for those students who are interested in developing or applying algorithms to solve real-world biological problems or to have a better understanding of biology in general.”

In his free time, Lee enjoys outdoor activities and is also an avid squash player.

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