Harlin Lee

Harlin Lee is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), affiliated with the School of Data Science and Society. She holds secondary appointments in the departments of Mathematics and Computer Science. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA Mathematics (2021–2023) and earned her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2021, alongside an MS in Machine Learning. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (BS 2016, MEng 2017).

Her research focuses on learning from high-dimensional structured data, including networks and low-dimensional subspaces, with applications in healthcare and social sciences. Notable awards include the Rising Stars in Data Science (2022), Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences (2022), and CMU ECE’s Outstanding Woman in Engineering (2021). She also received the UCLA Math Liggett Instructor Award (2023) and CMU’s ECE Outstanding TA Award (2020).

Current research interests span optimal transport, nonconvex optimization, and explainable AI for healthcare. Her work integrates mathematical foundations with real-world challenges, such as drug repurposing and pediatric sleep analysis. Courses taught include DATA 110 (Introduction to Data Science) in Spring 2025, emphasizing ethical practices, computational thinking, and statistical modeling.

• Education:
• PhD in ECE, CMU, 2021
• MS in Machine Learning, CMU, 2021
• MEng in EECS (AI concentration), MIT, 2017
• BS in EECS (Math minor), MIT, 2016

Her publications reflect interdisciplinary contributions to manifold learning, federated learning, and computational social science. She advises through collaborative projects in her lab, though current openings are limited to UNC graduate students.