Rate My Professor Jeremy Lee

Jeremy Lee is a Teaching Professor in the Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a B.S. from the University of California, Davis, a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a postdoctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Lee's primary focus is on undergraduate teaching and the development of undergraduate curricula in molecular, cell, and developmental biology, with particular emphasis on laboratory courses aimed at developing students’ technical and critical scientific thinking skills. He has taught developmental biology in both lecture and laboratory formats, eukaryotic genetics laboratory, introductory cell and molecular biology, and eukaryotic molecular biology. He is currently developing a new core biochemistry and molecular biology laboratory course. Lee serves on the department’s curriculum committee and acts as the faculty advisor for undergraduates in the MCD Biology and Biology majors. He also participates in the SEA-PHAGES program, instructing phage discovery and microbiology courses.

In research, Lee collaborates with colleagues at Drexel University on a program to identify regulators of the amyloid precursor protein (APP), a central protein in Alzheimer’s disease pathology. This work employs Drosophila models of Alzheimer’s disease to identify genes encoding proteins that affect Aβ-induced neurodegeneration by regulating APP levels and/or its cleavage products; Lee serves as the statistical consultant for the collaboration. His laboratory at UCSC involves undergraduate and graduate students in projects such as studying interactions between amyloid-beta and the antimicrobial peptide LL-37 in Drosophila models of Alzheimer’s disease. Key publications include Zhang, C. et al. (2007) 'An AICD-based functional screen to identify APP metabolism regulators' in Molecular Neurodegeneration and Patel, N. et al. (2008) 'MicroRNAs can regulate human APP levels' in Molecular Neurodegeneration. Additionally, he has contributed to educational scholarship, including a chapter on teaching PCR through inquiry in undergraduate biology laboratory courses.