Ming Ta Michael Lee graduated from the University of Toronto in 1998 with a B.Sc. degree in Medical Genetics. He then obtained his PhD in Virology from the University of Cambridge in 2002. Subsequently, he joined Dr. Bryan Cullen’s lab as a Research Associate at Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Duke University Medical Center working on HIV. He then joined Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen’s lab as a postdoc at Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica in Sept 2003 and was promoted to assistant director at the National Center for Genome Medicine (NCGM) from April 2004 and serves as the Director of the Pharmacogenomic Center in 2011 at Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica. In September 2012, he joined Center for Genomic Medicine at RIKEN as Team Leader of Laboratory for International Alliance.

Michael is involved in various genetic studies from rare diseases, complex diseases (osteoarthritis, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) and Pharmacogenetics. He is involved in the first genome-wide association study on bipolar I disorder in the Han-Chinese population. His major achievement is in the pharmacogenetic study of warfarin dose requirements, which resulted in the identification the SNP associated with warfarin dose. In addition to warfarin, he is also in involves in other pharmacogenetic studies such as clopidogrel response, NSAID induced angioedema, drug induced Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and clinical studies using pharmacogenetic markers. He also actively participates in several major international consortium, such as International Warfarin Pharmacogenetic Consortium, International Clopidogrel Pharmacogenetic Consortium, Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium and worked with a group of experts to develop clinical use of HLA-B*5801 and allopurinol.