Professor Su-In Lee, University of Washington, Seattle


Education

"Machine learning approaches to understand the genetic basis for complex traits" with Professor Daphne Koller in Stanford AI Lab

"Biologically inspired neural network approach using feature extraction and top-down selective attention for robust optical character recognition" with Professor Soo-Young Lee

Selected Media


Bio:

Professor Su-In Lee, the Paul G. Allen Endowed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington (UW), earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2009 under the guidance of Professor Daphne Koller. She joined UW in 2010 after serving as a visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Renowned for her groundbreaking work at the intersection of AI, biology, and medicine, Professor Lee has received several prestigious awards, including the Samsung Ho-Am Prize—often referred to as the “Korean Nobel Prize”— as the first woman to receive the Engineering award in its 34-year history, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Innovator Award, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. She has also been honored as an ACS Research Scholar and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow. Professor Lee is recognized as a pioneer in explainable AI (XAI) for her seminal contributions, particularly her Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) framework, significantly advancing the interpretability of machine learning models.

Her recent research focuses on fundamental XAI principles and techniques, as well as innovative biomedical research, spanning from basic biology to clinical medicine, which has been enabled by advancements in XAI. By fundamentally shifting how AI is integrated into biomedical research, her work addresses cutting-edge scientific questions and enables novel discoveries from high-throughput molecular data and electronic health records. This transformative integration is advancing healthcare in meaningful ways. This innovative research has resulted in highly cited publications in foundational AI, computational molecular biology, and clinical medicine.


Selected Awards & Honors:

Recognized as the “Korean Nobel Prize.” First woman to receive the Engineering award in its 34-year history

Recognized as being among the top 2% of medical and biological engineers

Awarded to a leading mid-career scientist who has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field of computational biology and continues to forge new directions