Lee is currently a professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering of Konkuk University since 2006, Republic of Korea. Before joining the KU, he was a project scientist in the Zhao lab at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in the cell biotechnology laboratory at the Korea Academy of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has focused on protein engineering and nanobiocatalysts; particularly, he has contributed on the understanding of biocatalytic mechanisms and the development of new protein engineering tools using Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM). His research group is highly interested in high-throughput screening of proteins and bioconversion of greenhouse gases to chemicals. As of August 2018, he published over 200 scientific articles, 55 patents, and gave over 100 scientific presentations at the international conferences and the invited seminars.