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
Education
Undergraduate (National University of Singapore, SINGAPORE)
Graduate (Doctor of Philosophy, Baylor College of Medicine, UNITED STATES)
Bio
A/Prof Caroline Lee’s academic and research focus is on Precision Medicine, particularly in the fields of cancer genomics, pharmacogenomics, and population genomics. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry and Human Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine and refined her expertise during her postdoctoral training in Gene Therapy at the National Cancer Institute under the Deputy Director of NIH, Dr. Michael Gottesman. Upon returning to Singapore, she initially assumed academic roles at the National University of Singapore, Johns Hopkins Singapore with joint appointment at Johns Hopkins University. She now serves as an Associate Professor at both NUS’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Duke-NUS Medical School. In addition, she contributes as Vice Dean (Outreach and Admissions) at the NUS Graduate School. She is also Co-Director of the MSc programme in Precision Health and Medicine at NUS, actively leading efforts to educate and equip future healthcare professionals with the tools to navigate this evolving landscape and drives innovation at the intersection of genomics, big data, and artificial intelligence.
A/Prof Lee holds award for elucidating polymorphisms in antineoplastic drug-response genes and patents for methods related to drug response prediction and genetic diagnostic technologies. Together with her publication record, it reflects her strong commitment to advancing precision medicine. Her research has contributed to improving our understanding of how genetic variations influence both cancer and drug responses and laid the foundation for population-specific pharmacogenomics. These contributions not only enhance our understanding of cancer biology and pharmaco-/population genetics but also inform the development of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that tailor treatments to individual genetic profiles. Her passion lies in integrating big data, artificial intelligence, and genomics to create individualized treatment strategies that have the potential to transform healthcare outcomes.
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
How do you give feedback on your students’ thesis drafts and progress?
Consultation Frequency
How often do you typically meet your PhD students one-on-one for consultation?
Research Group Meetings
How often do you typically hold lab meetings where your PhD students present their research work to the class?
My ‘door is always open’ and students can feel free to approach me to discuss science or any issues anytime