Prof. Tin-Lap Lee is an Associate Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining CUHK in 2011, he was a Staff Scientist at the Laboratory of Clinical Genomics, National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and Project Coordinator at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Prof. Lee is a Hong Kong native. He obtained his undergraduate degree in molecular biology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1997, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. in anatomical and cellular pathology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2001, he was invited to serve as a Visiting Fellow at National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorder, National Institutes of Health in 2001 to study the molecular and genome biology of head and neck cancer.

Recognizing that a revolution was beginning in genome biology, he pursued studying bioinformatics at National Institute of Bioinformatics and became a Certified Bioinformatics Specialist in 2002, and continue his new scientific adventure in Laboratory of Clinical Genomics, National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in 2004 to decode the regulatory mechanisms in developmental biology by using male germ cell and tumor models.

Prof. Lee has made a number of accomplishments in molecular and genome biology. He invented the first non-invasive method to detect epigenetic alterations in gastric cancer patients and led to prestigious Scholar-in-Training Award conferred by American Association for Cancer Research in 2001. He also discovered of p53 and NF-Kappab as the key segregating factors for molecular differentiation of head and neck cancer, which was featured on the cover of Clinical Cancer Research. His achievement in bioinformatics revolutionized dynamic analysis of Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) data for revealing novel regulatory targets and mechanisms in male germ cell and gonad development. The work was featured on the cover of Genomics and was recognized by National Institutes of Health by prestigious NIH Merit Award in 2005 and The Fellows Award for Research Excellence in 2006. His research performance has also been recognized by Government Employee Performance Awards. He is the author of 63 publications in peer-reviewed journals with more than 1500 citations, and 70 meeting abstracts in national scientific meetings. He has served as government panel member in the genome science policy study, members in various scientific societies and mentor in undergraduate and post-graduate research programs.