Melanie Lee

Research

Lee received an undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of York, working with Simon Hardy, and then a Ph.D. 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.

In 2003, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She was also Trustee and Deputy Chairman of Cancer Research UK for six years.

Works

Business

Lee became CEO of NightstaRx in 2014 and Chief Scientific Officer of BGT Plc in November 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 2010-13. She was chair of Cancer Research Technology. She is on the board of Lundbeck and founded the Think10 business advice company.

She was an advisor to the 2014-15 Dowling Review of business-university research collaborations.

Recognition

Lee was made a CBE in 2009 for services to medical science. In 2014, she was named as one of the top 100 "leading practising scientists" in the UK by the Science Council.

Personal life

She is married to Christopher, with whom she lives in London. They have two sons.