Rate My Professor Heather Lee

Associate Professor Heather Lee is an NHMRC Research Fellow in the School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing, at the University of Newcastle. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the University of Sydney. Her early career featured roles as a Research Assistant and Research Officer at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research's Cancer Research Program. She then pursued postdoctoral training at the Babraham Institute's Epigenetics programme in Cambridge, UK, from 2012 to 2016, alongside visiting scientist positions at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Garvan Institute. In 2017, Lee joined the University of Newcastle, establishing an independent research group at the Hunter Medical Research Institute focused on epigenetic heterogeneity in cancer.

Lee's research centres on epigenetic regulation of development and cancer cell plasticity, particularly dynamic DNA methylation in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), haematological tumours, and heterogeneous chemotherapeutic responses. She pioneered single-cell genome-wide bisulfite sequencing (scBS-seq), enabling epigenetic analysis at up to 48.4% of CpG sites per cell, as detailed in her highly cited Nature Methods paper (2014). Other key publications include 'Parallel single-cell sequencing links transcriptional and epigenetic heterogeneity' (Nature Methods, 2016), 'scNMT-seq enables joint profiling of chromatin accessibility, DNA methylation and transcription in single cells' (Nature Communications, 2018), and 'Single-cell epigenomics in cancer: charting a course to clinical impact' (Epigenomics, 2020). With over 60 publications, she has secured $9,580,880 across 23 grants, leading NHMRC Investigator ($2,199,113, 2023-2027) and Ideas Grants ($561,422, 2020-2022), Cancer Institute NSW Fellowship ($538,000, 2017-2021), and others. Awards include the Metcalf Prize for Stem Cell Research ($50,000, 2018). She has delivered keynotes at the Epigenetics User Group Symposium (2018) and Oz Single Cells (2017-2018), influencing single-cell epigenomics and advancing epigenetic therapies for cancer relapse prevention.