Virginia M.-Y. Lee

Biosketch

Virginia M.-Y. Lee, Ph.D. is the John H. Ware III endowed Professor for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. She studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London (1962-1964) and received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California at San Francisco in 1973. She completed her postdoctoral training at Children’s Hospital Medical Center at Harvard. She joined the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine in 1981 and rose to become Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine in 1989. She is the director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR) at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received many awards for her research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Lee identified tau, alpha-synuclein and TDP-43 as disease proteins that form unique inclusions in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and frontotemporal degeneration/Lou Gehrig’s disease, respectively, and has advanced understanding of their roles in these disorders. Dr. Lee is listed among the 10 most highly cited AD researchers from 1985-2008 and among the top 400 most highly influential biomedical researchers from 1996-2011. ISI has recognized Dr. Lee as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and places her in the top 10 most highly cited neuroscientists from 1997 to 2007 and acknowledged as a Clarivate 2022 Citation Laureate. She was the recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in 2020.

Research Interests

Dr. Virginia Lee’s work has profoundly advanced the field of knowledge on Alzheimer's, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by demonstrating that tau, α-synuclein (α-syn) and TDP-43 (TAR DNA-binding protein of 43 kD molecular weight) proteins form unique brain aggregates with central roles in common neurodegenerative diseases, including tau in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), α-syn in Parkinson’s disease (PD), tau and TDP-43 in frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) and TDP-43 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). T Her scientific work includes a number of singular contributions to elucidating the pathogenesis and mechanistic significance of the proteinacious inclusions that are hallmark lesions of AD, PD, FTD and ALS. Briefly, her most significant work includes elucidating the protein building blocks of AD neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), the Lewy bodies (LBs) of PD, and the ubiquitinated inclusions characteristic of ALS and two major subtypes of FTD (FTD-Tau and FTD-TDP). Significantly, she generated animal models for all these neurodegenerative diseases and her recent work demonstrates that cell-to-cell transmission of pathologic tau, α-syn and TDP-43 is a shared mechanism of disease pathogenesis and progression. Thus, Dr. Lee's studies implicated the abnormal aggregation of tau, α-syn, and TDP-43 in mechanisms that compromise neuronal viability in patients with these neurodegenerative diseases. Most importantly, these advancements have opened up new avenues of research to identify targets for drug discovery to develop better treatments for these disorders.