The 2025 Lewis Katz School of Medicine Annual Hamilton Lecture

Hosted by the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program (CBGN Cluster)

Reception to follow

Dr. Virginia Man-Yee Lee, Ph.D

Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Transmission of Misfolded Proteins in Neurodegenerative Disorders: A Common Mechanism of Disease Progression

Dr. Virginia Man-Yee Lee, Ph.D. is a world-renowned, highly accomplished scientist and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lee has earned a B.Sc. in Chemistry, a M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of London, and a Ph.D in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco under the supervision of Dr. Choh Hao Li. Dr. Lee completed her postdoctoral work at both the Rudolf Magnus Institute of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands as well as at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. With her late husband, Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, M.D., Ph.D., Dr. Lee’s studies within the Alzheimer’s disease field led to the discovery of TDP-43, a protein that binds to DNA and can become harmful when built up in the brain.

Since then, Dr. Lee has studied various neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and age-related neurodegenerative disorders.