Dongwon LeeView profile
Assistant Professor
Dongwon Lee is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Nephrology at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is affiliated with the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research and serves as an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Additionally, he is a faculty member of the Harvard Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD Program, where he contributes to training the next generation of computational biologists. Dr. Lee received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 and completed postdoctoral research at the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics at NYU School of Medicine. His educational background has provided a strong foundation for his interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computational biology, genomics, and pediatric kidney diseases. Dr. Lee's research focuses on understanding how gene regulation contributes to the development and progression of human diseases, specifically pediatric kidney diseases. His laboratory employs a combination of single-cell multiomics data, genetic data from disease cohorts, functional assays, and machine-learning approaches to address complex biological problems. Key research areas include building cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks, developing machine-learning models to identify regulatory variants, and validating predictions using high-throughput sequencing technologies in collaboration with experimental biologists. His work has significant implications for understanding the molecular basis of kidney diseases and developing new genomic computational tools. Analysis of Dr. Lee's recent publications reveals a strong trend toward increasingly sophisticated integration of single-cell multiomic data with machine learning techniques to understand transcriptional regulation in kidney disease. His research spans computational method development, regulatory genomics, and translational applications in nephrology, with a growing emphasis on cell-type-specific resolution and clinical correlations. Dr. Lee leads an active research laboratory with multiple computational biologists and research assistants. His team includes current members Anya Greenberg, Jeerthi Kannan, Yangyang Lin, Daniel Nguyen, and Eric Sakkas, as well as notable alumni including Seong Kyu Han (now Assistant Professor in South Korea), Ana Onuchic-Whitford (now Instructor at Harvard Medical School), and Jihoon Yoon (now Clinical Fellow in South Korea). His laboratory regularly recruits postdoctoral fellows and research assistants with computational backgrounds to advance their research on genomic regulation of kidney diseases. The Lee Laboratory has developed several important computational tools including LS-GKM (a scalable gkm-SVM for large-scale datasets), gkmQC (for quality assessment of chromatin accessibility data), and MTSA (for MPRA tag sequence analysis). These resources are publicly available on GitHub and have been widely adopted by the genomics research community. The laboratory maintains strong collaborative relationships with clinicians and experimental biologists to ensure their computational approaches have meaningful biological and clinical relevance.
