Homecoming Lecture: From Snowstorms to Star Trek: A Career in Advanced Technology

Dr. Peter Lee is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research. He manages Microsoft’s worldwide research operations, comprising twelve laboratories and over 1,000 researchers, engineers, and support personnel dedicated to advancing the state of the art in computing and creating new technologies for Microsoft’s products and services. Prior to joining Microsoft, Lee held key positions in both government and academia, most recently at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he founded and directed a major technology office that supported research in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. Prior to DARPA, Lee served as head of Carnegie Mellon University’s nationally top-ranked computer science department. He also served as the university’s vice provost for research.

Lee has shown executive-level leadership in world-class research organizations spanning academia, government, and industry. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves the research community at the national level, including policy contributions to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and membership on both the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the Advisory Council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He was the former chair of the Computing Research Association and has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

Lee holds a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer sciences, also from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.