Joonhee (Leo) Lee

Leo is a neuroscientist who received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he focused on utilizing functional neuroimaging to understand how the human brain performs complex movements such as playing a musical instrument. Specifically, he investigated how brain regions responsible for generating movements interact with cognitive regions that support memory formation and motivation. Currently, Leo is a postdoctoral researcher supported by the Harvard MBB postdoctoral fellow award in the Kuzawa lab and a member of the CANDY lab led by Dr. Jingyuan Chen (lab link) at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. He is implementing multi-modal neuroimaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), and electroencephalography (EEG), to understand how the brain’s energy metabolism varies across different cognitive states. He is also working with Dr. Kuzawa to explore how the evolutionary expansion of different brain regions may have been shaped by environmental demands, with a particular focus on the hippocampus.