Selected Media

• Three is a magic number: Professor Su-In Lee earns trio of honors by Allen School News.

• 2024 Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering,  YouTube video (8.5 mins)

• The 2024 ISCB Innovator Award—Dr Su-In Lee by the International Society for Computational Biology

• Professor Su-In Lee, the first female recipient of the Engineering Award... "The essence of research is to create a better world." by The JoongAng and many related newspaper articles

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, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, and ISCB Distinguished 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:

• Distinguished Fellow, International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) (2025)

• Boeing Endowed Professorship (2025)

• Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering (2024) 

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

"Dr. Su-In Lee is a world-renowned scholar who had pioneered the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and its application in the biomedical fields..." (more)

• AIMBE Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) (2024)

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

• The ISCB Innovator Award, International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) (2024) 

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

"Dr. Lee has made remarkable strides in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with biomedicine. Her pioneering work in AI, notably the SHAP framework and subsequent algorithms, has revolutionized the interpretability of machine learning models, enabling profound insights into complex biological phenomena. Her research, spanning prestigious publications and impactful applications across various domains, underscores her profound contributions to computational biology and AI."

• Paul G. Allen Career Development Professorship (2021)

• Annual Science in Medicine Lecture by UW School of Medicine (2018)

• Best Lecture, Computational Genomics Winter Institute, UCLA (2018)

• American Cancer Society Research Scholar (2015)

• NSF CAREER Award (2014)

• Finalist. Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Program, Microsoft (2013)

• Samsung Lee Kun Hee Fellowship 

• Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University 

• The President of KAIST Award, awarded to the 1st runner-up for academic excellence, KAIST (2001)

• Merit-based full scholarship from KAIST

• Gold Prize, 1st place, at the Samsung Humantech Paper Competition (2000)