Michelle Lee

Michelle Lee, from Seoul, South Korea, is pursuing a PhD in chemistry at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. She graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Michelle aspires to understand and precisely manipulate the cellular machinery with synthetic molecules, which will open a door for novel, efficient, and affordable therapeutic strategies, especially in curing genetic diseases. In college, she designed a small molecule “switch” to CRISPR activity, which can precisely manipulate the activity of CRISPR-Cas protein, increasing its efficacy and reducing off-target effects. She also designed an affordable, rapid “mix-and-read” COVID-19 diagnostics tool for use in low- and middle-income countries, the work for which she was a first author of a publication. At MIT, Michelle also pushed to increase the accessibility of education by leading multiple educational enrichment programs. She is pursuing her PhD as an NSF GRFP Fellow.