Virginia Man-Yee Lee (Chinese: 李文渝; born 1945) is a Chinese-born American biochemist and neuroscientist who specializes in the research of Alzheimer's disease.

[3][4] Afterwards, Lee moved to the United States to be closer to her mother, who was living Los Angeles, and pursued her PhD at the University of California, San Francisco under the supervision of Choh Hao Li.

[3][6] She then entered the biotechnology sector in 1979, when she became the associate senior research investigator at the Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, now a part of GlaxoSmithKline.

[3][6] Fearing the transition, she took an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 as a "back-up plan" to be at the pharmaceutical industry, completing two years later.

[7] In 2004, the Marian S. Ware Center for Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Program was established at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lee has been directing it since.

Together with her late husband John Q. Trojanowski, Lee's studies challenged conventional belief that Alzheimer's disease is caused by aggregation of amyloid plaques, and pointed to the tau protein as a major player.

[17] Apart from these two relatively well-known neurodegenerative diseases, Lee and Trojanowski also studied frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and multiple system atrophy.