Jungmin Lee, PhD

Jungmin Lee, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Wendell Lim at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Lee received her BS in Chemistry from Duke University and her PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University. She is interested in rationally engineering biological molecules to precisely control their behaviors and using these engineering principles to inform better therapeutic designs. 

Her PhD research in the laboratory of Dr. Pamela Silver focused on designing novel protein therapeutics with greater tissue specificity and reduced off-target cross-reactivity based on protein structure-function relationships and spatial geometry of target proteins. 

Now, Dr. Lee wants to expand her expertise to the cellular level and engineer cells that can perform novel therapeutic functions in response to various input signals at the site of the disease. She is currently developing a smarter, next-generation chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy by incorporating synthetic gene circuits that can improve tumor recognition and tumor infiltration of CAR T cells for the treatment of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.