[2] Lee began her academic career as an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University[3] as the first female faculty in 1994.

Lee's research focuses on mathematical programming, information technology, game theory, networks, machine learning and computational algorithms for risk assessment, decision making, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery, and systems and performance optimization.

Her homeland security work has focused on risk assessment and protection of critical infrastructures, including healthcare, supply chain and logistics, power plants, communication, and finance.

Lee served as the CDC-sponsored principal investigator of an online interoperable information exchange and decision support system, RealOpt, for mass dispensing, emergency response, and casualty mitigation.

Working with local hospitals and organizations, Lee focuses on transformation advances that can drive our healthcare delivery that is safe, effective, efficient, timely, equitable and patient-centered.

The system she developed has decision support capabilities for modeling and optimizing the public health infrastructure for hazardous emergency response].

Although Lee received numerous offers from technology companies wanting to buy the program from her and Georgia Tech, she negotiated with the university to make it available free so that any health department could use it.

In 2019, Lee was appointed a member of the Gulf War Illness Clinical Case Definition Steering Committee for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

From 2013 - 2014, Lee served as a member of the National Research Council Committee for "Assessment of Supercritical Water Oxidation System Testing for the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant.” The committee was charged to reviews and evaluates the results of the tests conducted on one of the SCWO units to be provided to Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant.

[25] Since January 2020, Lee has been working with federal, state and local leaders on COVID-19 containment and mitigation, strategic testing, timing for non-pharmaceutical intervention, medical and personnel surge, resource allocation, reopening operations logistics, treatment prediction and outcome analysis, and vaccine prioritization and distribution.

Kaiser Health News first obtained the correspondence through public records request in King County, Washington, where officials struggled as the virus set upon a nursing home in the Seattle area.

[28] The emails show that Lee voiced serious concerns regarding personal protective equipment supply chain disruption, asymptomatic and post-recovery transmission (from an NEJM online article in January),[29] the importance of public awareness and the roll-out of non-pharmaceutical intervention.

[33] With Marco Zaider at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Lee was the 2007 winner of the Franz Edelman Award of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

The Memorial Sloan team went on to receive the 2012 INFORMS Impact Prize[33] for their use of operations research and analytics throughout the center and particularly in treating prostate cancer.

[16] She was elected to the 2015 class of fellows of INFORMS, for exceptional accomplishments in OR methodologies and to OR practice in medicine, healthcare, and emergency preparedness, with successful implementations and broad impact.

And in the same year her team (Georgia Tech, Emory, CDC) won the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for their work on machine learning in vaccine immunogenicity prediction.

[33][37] Lee, along with Brent Egan of the American Medical Association, was named the first runner-up for their work on "Machine Learning: Multi-site Evidence-based Best Practice Discovery" for the 2019 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award.

The study establishes interoperability among electronic medical records from 737 healthcare sites and performs machine learning for best practice discovery.

[38] She was inducted into the College of Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2019[39] for contributions in novel cancer therapeutics, vaccine immunogenicity prediction, and public health emergency preparedness with successful implementation and broad impact.

[40] The grant from NSF ($40,000 per year) was leveraged to build strong collaborative relationships with Atlanta healthcare centers and hospitals (members).

They also paid for background screening, drug tests, parking, and in some cases monthly liability insurance, and provided IDs for all participating students each year.

The members also provided in-kind contributions, including hospital access, patient data, and HIPAA training that helped shape students' intellectual growth and career preparation.

In December 2019, Lee pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to lying to NSF investigators and submitting a membership certificate with false information.

[42] In August 2020, a federal judge gave Lee a lighter sentence than was requested by the prosecution, so that she could continue her work on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in a timely manner.

[43] The case is unusual in multiple aspects: the refusal of U.S. Attorney to dismiss the charges; the repeated denial of Georgia Tech administrators to requests from top U.S. health officials to restore Lee's access to her computers while COVID-19 raged across the country.