Ernest Lee, MD, PhD
Dr. Lee is a dermatologist and physician-scientist who has trained in soft matter physics, structural and computational biology, immunology, and microbiology. He received his B.S. with honors in Physics from the California Institute of Technology and an M.D./Ph.D. in Bioengineering from UCLA and the David Geffen School of Medicine. He completed a residency in dermatology and postdoctoral training in computational immunology at UCSF. He is interested in leveraging bioinformatic and computational tools to advance precision medicine in dermatology. His previous research focused on machine-learning aided design and discovery of membrane-active antimicrobial peptides, molecular mechanisms underlying immune dysregulation in psoriasis, lupus, and scleroderma, and the role of the nervous system in host defense against systemic infection. He also sees patients and teaches in the UCSF Mt. Zion General Dermatology clinic.
Precision medicine for inflammatory skin disease
Dr. Lee’s research spans basic and translational approaches to drug discovery for chronic inflammatory skin diseases. He is interested in developing machine learning and bioinformatic tools to integrate large multi-omic datasets generated from patient skin and blood to identify novel therapies and characterize new targets using computational and structural approaches and experimental validation.