Assoc Professor Guat Lay, Caroline Lee
Faculty & Department
Joint Appointments
Vice Dean, Dean's Office (nus Graduate School), NUS Graduate School
Associate Professor, Integrative Sciences and Engineering
Associate Professor, Cancer and Stem Cell Biology (CSCB), Duke-NUS
Vice Dean, Dean's Office (NUS Graduate School), NUS Graduate School
Education
Doctor of Philosophy, Baylor College of Medicine, Singapore
Bachelor of Science Hons Class 2A, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Bio
A/Prof Caroline Lee is a leading figure in Precision Medicine, with core expertise in cancer genomics, pharmacogenomics, and population genomics. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Human Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training in Gene Therapy at the National Cancer Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Gottesman, Deputy Director of the NIH. Her academic journey has taken her from key faculty roles at the National University of Singapore and Johns Hopkins Singapore, to her current appointments as Associate Professor at both NUS’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Duke-NUS Medical School.
A/Prof Lee also serves as Vice Dean (Outreach and Admissions) at the NUS Graduate School and is Co-Director of the MSc programme in Precision Health and Medicine, where she leads efforts to equip future healthcare professionals with critical skills in genomics, big data, and artificial intelligence.
Her award-winning research has advanced understanding of how genetic variation shapes cancer risk and therapeutic response, particularly in Asian populations. A/Prof Lee has been recognized for elucidating polymorphisms in antineoplastic drug-response genes and holds patents for drug response prediction and genetic diagnostic technologies. Her influential publications have laid the foundation for population-specific pharmacogenomics, informing both diagnostic and therapeutic innovation.
A/Prof Lee’s passion lies in integrating genomics, big data, and AI to pioneer individualized treatment strategies—efforts that are reshaping the landscape of healthcare and driving the next wave of precision medicine.
Contact Information
Our current research interests focus on 2 major fields of Functional Genomics of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) and Population/Pharmaco-genetics. In the field of HCC, our laboratory is interested in employing next-generation genetic, molecular, cellular and computational approaches to elucidate clinically important genes, lncRNAs, miRNAs, circRNAs that are dysregulated in HCC and associated with poorer prognosis. One of the genes that our laboratory identified to be highly over-expressed in HCC is FAT10, the gene in this proposal. Our laboratory is the first to show that FAT10 is over-expressed in HCC and other inflammation-associated cancers and we also identified that it plays a role in tumorigenesis through interacting non-covalently with MAD2 to delocalize MAD2 from the kinetochore causing aneuploidy and ultimately tumorigenesis. We are in the process of investigating the role of FAT10 in linking inflammation and metabolism in cancer.
In the field of Population/Pharmaco-genetics, our laboratory is interested in identifying functionally important polymorphisms that are associated with drug response. Integrating potentially functional SNP resource developed in our laboratory with gene-pathway information and analyzing population differences of SNPs, we develop an algorithm to identify drug/drug groups that potentially exhibit population differences in response using SNP data mining and analytics. We are in the process of validating the algorithm with real-world clinical data and incorporating deep learning/AI to improve the algorithm of predicting drug response.
Selecting Research Topics?
How do you guide your PhD students in selecting research topics?
Setbacks / Challenges
How do you handle setbacks or challenges faced by your PhD students?
Feedback
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Consultation Frequency
How often do you typically meet your PhD students one-on-one for consultation?
Research Group Meetings
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My ‘door is always open’ and students can feel free to approach me to discuss science or any issues anytime