Alumni
Interviews:
 Yuan Chuan Lee, Ph.D.
"I receive the greatest satisfaction from seeing
the success of former students and their appreciation of my efforts."
Yuan Chuan Lee was drawn to glycoscience as a graduate student
working with Rex Montgomery, PhD, UI professor of biochemistry,
whose lessons encompassed more than simply science. When Lee offered
to assist a fellow student, saying his own work was done for the
day, Montgomery declared, "There is no such day for a scientist." Lee
took the words to heart.
He since has become in internationally known investigator. Leaving
Iowa, he did postdoctoral work at the University of California,
Berkely, then joined the Johns Hopkins University faculty. He later
returned to his native Taiwan as an Academia Sinica visiting professor,
and also has held visiting appointments in Kyoto, Japan, and Beijing
and Shanghai, China.
Lee’s work in analytical glycobiology, structural glycobiology
and carbohydrate recognition has helped build glycoscience from
a small division of biochemistry to an established field. Today
it’s an important areas of postgenomic biology.
The synthetic proteins Lee’s lab created in the late 1970s
boosted the speed and accuracy of experiments that showed how carbohydrates
on cell surfaces affect cellular function and interactions. These
and other findings have contributed to treatments for tissue rejection,
hepatitis, nerve damage, cancer and inflammation.
Achievements like these have won Lee the prestigious Claud S.
Hudson Award from the American Chemical Society, the C.H. Li Memorial
Award from Academia Sinica and the National Institutes of Health
Fogarty Fellowship. He has published more than 300 papers and has
served as an executive editor for Analytical Biochemistry since
1978.
Outside the lab, Lee has written articles for Chinese and Japanese
publications, including one chosen among the top 60 essays published
in Japan. He also is an avid chamber musician.
He passes on the lessons he’s learned through his commitment
to students. At this point in his career, he said, he receives
the greatest satisfaction from "seeing the success of former
students and their appreciation of my efforts."
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