Born in 1936, Yuan Tseh Lee received his B.S. degree from Taiwan University in 1959, and his 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.

Dr. Lee has received numerous awards and honors, including the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the U.S. National Medal of Science, and Faraday Medal from the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain. He is a fellow of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and Academia Sinica; a foreign member of Göttingen Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences, etc. Dr. Lee has received Doctor Honoris Causa from 27 universities throughout the world.