Chanmi Lee, MD, PhD

Chanmi Lee, MD, PhD, is a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with a lifelong passion for understanding the immune system in both health and disease. Born in South Korea and raised in New Zealand, she earned her B.Sc. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Auckland before completing both her MSc and PhD in Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. Her graduate research focused on transcriptional regulation in innate immune cells, uncovering novel roles for the ETS-family factor ESE-1 in neutrophil survival, macrophage differentiation, and inflammatory signaling; bridging basic immunology with translational insights into chronic inflammatory disease. She earned her MD from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM) of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, where she also conducted research on the role of aggrecan in cardiovascular development and disease. She completed her internal medicine residency at Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals and the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Her current research focuses on exploring how the tumor microenvironment might be reprogrammed to make cancers more sensitive to therapy and how immune-tumor interactions might drive cancer cell plasticity.