Dr. Hey-Kyoung Lee is a Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and is currently serving as the Chair of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program.
She received her B.S. degree in Biology from Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) in 1992. In 1997, she completed her graduate studies under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Bear, and received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA). Her thesis work focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of bidirectional synaptic plasticity. Dr. Lee pursued her postdoctoral training in neuroscience with Dr. Richard Huganir at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (Baltimore, Maryland, USA), where she studied the role of AMPA receptor phosphorylation in synaptic plasticity.
In 2003, she joined the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland College Park as an Assistant Professor. She was award the Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship in 2004 and was nominated as the “Yonsei 100 Women Leaders” in 2006. In 2009, she was awarded the Junior Faculty Award from the College of Chemical and Life Sciences at the University of Maryland. In 2011, Dr. Lee received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor. She subsequently moved to the Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl-Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University as an Associate Professor. In 2015, Dr. Lee received tenure and was promoted to Full Professor.
One of Dr. Lee’s main research interests is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, especially in sensory cortices. In particular, she aims to understand how the brain circuits and synapses adapt to losing a sensory modality. Her research has implications for understanding cross-modal plasticity and recovering plasticity in the adult brain.
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