Prof. Su-In Lee, University of Washington, Seattle


Education

"Machine learning approaches to understand the genetic basis for complex traits" with Prof. 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 Prof. Soo-Young Lee

Bio:

Prof. Su-In Lee, the Paul G. Allen Professor of Computer Science at UW, earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2009 under the mentorship of Prof. Daphne Koller. She joined UW in 2010 after serving as a visiting Assistant Professor in the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Recognized for her groundbreaking contributions to AI, biology, and medicine, Prof. Lee has received prestigious accolades including the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Innovator Award, and the Samsung Ho-Am Prize, often referred to as the "Korean Nobel Prize," and designation as an American Cancer Society (ACS) Research Scholar and a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Notably, she is recognized as a pioneer and trailblazer in explainable AI (XAI), significantly enhancing ML model interpretability.

Prof. Lee's recent contributions revolve around essential XAI principles and techniques, including her groundbreaking SHAP framework. Her innovative biomedical research spans basic biology to clinical medicine, enabled by XAI advancements. Conceptually advancing the integration of AI with biomedicine, her work addresses forward-looking scientific questions, enabling novel discoveries from high-throughput molecular data and electronic health records and advancing healthcare. This pioneering line of work has led to highly cited publications across 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