James R. Lee is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 2005, and then spent a year as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research interests lie broadly in algorithms, optimization, and probability theory. He is particularly interested in the application of convexity, metric geometry, and spectral graph theory to these areas. His work on SDP extension complexity was co-winner of the Best Paper Award at STOC 2015. In 2017, he was named a Simons Investigator.