Prof Lee obtained her medical degrees from the National University of Singapore and the Royal College of Physicians, United Kingdom, and completed a fellowship in cancer genetics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, United States. She is currently Head and Senior Consultant with the Department of Haematology-Oncology, and Associate Director of Research at NCIS, as well as Senior Principal Investigator at the Cancer Science Institute, Singapore. She is ex-Chairperson of the Chapter of Medical Oncologists, Academy of Medicine, Singapore, and has been a member of the Ministry of Health Specialist Accreditation Board for Medical Oncology since 2009. She has been Chair of the National Healthcare Group Domain-Specific Ethics Review Board B since 2008. She is also a member of the Singapore Ministry of Health Drug Advisory Committee for Oncology drugs.
She specialises in breast cancer and directs the Cancer Genetics program at NCIS. Her research focus is on breast cancer, pharmacogenetics and cancer genetics, and she has been the Principal Investigator of more than 40 industry-sponsored and investigator-initiated breast cancer clinical trials. She directs the Haematology-Oncology Research Group, a cancer clinical trials unit that conducts 100-120 phase I-III therapeutics clinical trials in solid tumours and haematological malignancies at the National University Cancer Institute.
She was awarded the Singapore National Medical Research Council Senior Clinician Scientist Award in 2009 and again in 2015, and has almost 150 peer-reviewed publications in major oncology and pharmacogenetics journals, including Cancer, Oncology, Lancet Oncology, JAMA Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Annals of Oncology, British Journal of Cancer, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Pharmacogenetics and Genomics, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Genetics. She has reviewed for international journals including Gut, British Journal of Cancer, Pharmacogenetics and Genomics, Personalized Medicine, Annals of Oncology, Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology, and Pharmacogenomics.