Tun-Hou Lee, Ph.D.
李敦厚 博士

Professor, Harvard School of Public Health

Tun-Hou Lee, Professor of Virology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He was a graduate of National Taiwan University and received his doctoral degree from Harvard University and post-doctoral training at the Karolinska Institute of Sweden.

Dr. Lee's major research interests are host-virus interactions with particular focus on human and related primate retroviruses. His work has contributed to the development of serologic testing for the human leukemia virus (HTLV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He was the first to identify envelope gene products of HTLV-I, HTLV-II and HIV, and demonstrated that the envelope antibody is the most important marker for screening individuals for infection with these human retroviruses. He also identified the putative transforming protein of HTLV-I, which was the first observation of a retrovirus protein linked to a cancer that was not an oncogene product. Other gene products of HIV-1 and HIV-2 identified by Dr. Lee and his co-workers include those encoded by the vpu, vif, vpr,vpx and nef genes. Several patents related to his discoveries have been awarded to Harvard University.