Lee was born in
Busan in 1979. She became a student at
Seoul Science High School, and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from
KAIST in 2001. She went to
Stanford University for graduate study in computer science, and completed her Ph.D. in 2009 in the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with the dissertation
Machine learning approaches to understand the genetic basis for complex traits supervised by
Daphne Koller. After postdoctoral research as a visiting assistant professor at
Carnegie Mellon University, Lee joined the University of Washington in 2010. She was given a Paul G. Allen Career Development Professorship in 2021, and was named as a Boeing Endowed Professor of Computer Science in 2025. ==Recognition==