PHILADELPHIA (September 12, 2022)—Fox Chase Cancer Center is pleased to announce the hiring of Hayan Lee, PhD, as an assistant professor in the Cancer Signaling and Epigenetics research program and the Cancer Epigenetics Institute (CEI).
The recently founded CEI at Fox Chase is a national hub for epigenetics study and collaboration focused on mechanisms promoting cancer and therapeutic resistance. Its mission is to facilitate academic-to-industry and academic-to-academic partnerships with the goal of promoting discovery in cancer epigenetics.
Lee earned her undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea and a master of science degree in information security technology and management from Carnegie Mellon University.
She then earned a doctorate in computer science from Stony Brook University. Her doctoral dissertation focused on algorithms and applications in genome assembly using long-read sequencing technology.
Prior to joining Fox Chase, Lee was a research scientist in the Stanford School of Medicine’s department of genetics. She has also been a computational postdoctoral scholar in the Snyder Lab at the Stanford School of Medicine and a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
At Fox Chase, Lee will focus on pinpointing somatic epi-mutations in early stage pancreatic cancer and its subtypes using comprehensive multi-omics data analysis. She intends to use this research to develop deep neural network models to predict image data, specifically spatial transcriptomics related to cancer microenvironment, early diagnosis, prognostic prediction, cancer resistance, and metastasis.
Over the course of her career, Lee has authored multiple peer-reviewed articles. Her research interests include computational epigenetics, computational oncology, machine learning, AI, methylation biomarkers, long-read sequencing technology, and de novo genome assembly.
Lee is also the recipient of several honors and awards. These include the International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology’s Best Paper Award, a Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a PhD Fellowship from Stony Brook University. She also has an extensive history of mentorship experience, ranging from high school interns to graduate students.
Lee began her tenure at Fox Chase on August 15.