Dr. Yuan Tseh Lee
Born in 1936, Yuan Tseh Lee received his B.S. degree from Taiwan University in 1959, M.S. from Tsing Hua University in 1961, and Doctorate from UC-Berkeley in 1965. He joined Dudley Herschbach’s group at Harvard as a research fellow in 1967. After being appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago in 1968, Dr. Lee rapidly made his laboratory a major center for molecular beam study in North America. He returned to Berkeley as Professor of Chemistry in 1974. He was University Professor and Principal Investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, UC Berkeley, before he became President of Academia Sinica in 1994. In 2006 he became President Emeritus and Distinguished Research Fellow at the same institution. In 2008 he was elected president of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and took up the appointment in 2010 for a period of three years.
Dr. Lee has received numerous awards and honors, including the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the U.S. National Medal of Science, Peter Debye Award from American Chemical Society, Faraday Medal and Prize from the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Medal from the Indian National Science Academy. He is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and Academia Sinica; a foreign member of Göttingen Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Sciences, Japan Academy, Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences, etc. Dr. Lee has received Doctor Honoris Causa from 42 universities throughout the world.