Education
Lee received an undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of York, working with Simon Hardy, and then a Doctor of Philosophy at National Institute for Medical Research in London.
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Melanie Lee
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Research
Lee worked as a molecular genetics postdoc, first at Imperial College London on yeast and then from 1985 with Paul Nurse at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund"s Lincoln"s Inn Laboratories. Nurse said of this work that "I suppose the most astonishing thing was the way Melanie Lee in the lab did it by complementation." Lee later recounted being uncomfortable with the competition in the laboratory. In 2003, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
She was also Trustee and Deputy Chairman of Cancer Research United Kingdom for six years.
= Works Lee, Melanie G. Nurse, Paul (May 7, 1987).
"Complementation used to clone a human homologue of the fission yeast cell cycle control gene cdc2". Nature 327: 31–5. doi:10.1038/327031a0. PMID 3553962. Business
Lee became Chief Executive Officer of NightstaRx in 2014 and Chief Scientific Officer of BGT Plc in November 2014.
She began her pharmaceutical industry career at Glaxo in 1988, leaving academia after she became pregnant.
She joined Celltech in 1998 where she was Director of R&Doctorate. She held the same role at University of California, Berkeley Pharmaceuticals and was Chief Executive Officer of Syntaxin Limited from 2010-2013. She was chair of Cancer Research Technology.
She is on the board of Lundbeck and founded the Think10 business advice company. She was an advisor to the 2014-2015 Dowling Review of business-university research collaborations.
Lee was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to medical science.
In 2014, she was named as a one of the top 100 "leading practising scientists" in the United Kingdom by the Science Council.
