Yen-Jie Lee PhD '11

Research Interests

Yen-Jie Lee is an experimental particle physicist specializing in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. Working at the Large Hadron Collider, he probes matter at extreme temperatures and densities, illuminating the dynamics of the strong force and the conditions of the early universe and neutron-star interiors. His studies of jets and heavy-flavor production in nucleus-nucleus collisions have advanced understanding of the quark–gluon plasma predicted by quantum chromodynamics and the structure of heavy nuclei. He also pioneered investigations of high-density QCD using electron–positron annihilation data by founding and leading the electron-positron alliance collaboration (https://ee-alliance.org/home/)

Biographical Sketch

Yen‐Jie Lee completed his undergraduate degree and Master’s in Physics at the National Taiwan University with the Belle collaboration and his doctoral work at MIT in 2011 under the supervision of Wit Busza. After postdoctoral work at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT, he completed a combined CERN and Marie Curie Fellowship at CERN from 2012 to 2013. He joined the MIT Physics faculty in September 2013. He served as one of the Heavy Ion Physics Group co-conveners in the CMS collaboration from 2014 to 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, he served as a heavy-ion physics executive board representative in the CMS collaboration. Lee is a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Prof. Lee received an Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2015, an NEC Corporation Fund Award from the MIT Research Support Committee, a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2016, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. He was promoted to associate professor in 2018 and to full professor in 2024.