Research Lee received an undergraduate degree in Biology from the
University of York, working with Simon Hardy, and then a PhD at
National Institute for Medical Research in London. Lee worked as a
molecular genetics postdoc, first at
Imperial College London on yeast and then from 1985 with
Paul Nurse at the
ICRF's
Lincoln's Inn Laboratories. Nurse's work on the
cell cycle won him the Nobel Prize, and in his speech he cited Lee's work on finding a human homologue of the yeast gene
cdc2. Nurse said of this work that "I suppose the most astonishing thing was the way Melanie Lee in the lab did it by complementation." Lee later recounted being uncomfortable with the competition in the laboratory.
Works •
Business Lee was appointed
chief executive officer of
LifeArc in November 2018. Lee currently serves on the Board of Directors at
Sanofi and on the Board of Trustees at the Dementia Research Institute. Previously, she was
chief scientific officer of
BGT Plc and was the founder and CEO of NightstaRx, a
Syncona,
Wellcome Trust company in 2014. She began her pharmaceutical industry career at
Glaxo in 1988, leaving academia after she became pregnant. She joined
Celltech in 1998 where she was Director of R&D. She held the same role at
UCB Pharmaceuticals and was CEO of Syntaxin Ltd from 2010 to 2013. She had Chair and Deputy Chair Trustee appointments at Cancer Research Technology and
Cancer Research UK respectively. She was on the board of Lundbeck She was an advisor to the 2014–15
Dowling Review of business-university research collaborations. ==Awards==