Assistant Professor
Cornell University
Esak (Isaac) Lee is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. His research focuses on creating tissue chip models to recapitulate human biology and physiology to provide mechanistic understandings of human diseases such as lymphatic disease, immunological disease, and cancer. Prior to his joining the faculty at Cornell in 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, where he worked on 3D tissue chips for studying lymphedema and cancer metastasis. After joining Cornell, he is continuously working in the fields with NIH funding from NHLBI, NCI, and NIAID. He has published more than 35 articles in peer-reviewed journals and received awards including the Microcirculatory Society Award for Excellence in Lymphatic Research, Adam Rachel Broder Award for Cancer Research, Emerging Leaders in Biological Engineering, Cornell’s Meinig Family Investigatorship, IEEE Nano Medicine Honorarium, Lymphatic Education & Research Network (LE&RN) Young Investigator Award, LE&RN Postdoctoral Fellowship, and NIH TL1 Postdoctoral Fellowship. He earned his B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering and M.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Seoul National University in South Korea, and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.