Virginia M.-Y. Lee

Dr. Virginia M.-Y. Lee is the John H. Ware 3rd Professor in Alzheimer’s Research in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. st the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, where she is Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research and Co-director of the Marian S. Ware Alzheimer Drug Discovery Program .

Lee studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London (1962–1964), and then obtained an MS in Biochemistry from the University of London in 1968) and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California at San Francisco in 1973. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rudolf Magnus Institute of the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands (1973–1974) and i at Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston (1974–1979).

She then was appointed Associate Senior Research Investigator at Smith-Kline & French, Inc. in Philadelphia from 1979-1980. In 1981. She joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the [Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, attaining the rank of Professor in 1989. She also received an MBA in 1984 from the Executive MBA program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Lee’s research interest is neurodegenerative diseases, including: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal degeneration, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis .