Meredith Lee

Meredith Lee is the Head of Strategic Partnerships and Chief Technical Advisor to the Dean at the University of California, Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society–the first new College launched at UC Berkeley in 50+ years. She works across and beyond campus to design and enable transformative collaboration opportunities, leveraging 25+ years of experience from academia, industry, nonprofits, and government.

In her role on the CDSS Leadership Team, Dr. Lee has worked closely with faculty, deans, and key partners to develop research and education initiatives including the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health and Open Platforms Powering Science and Society. Her current portfolio focuses on identifying and enabling emerging opportunities at the intersection of data science, human-centered design, and Generative AI.

During the Obama Administration, Dr. Lee led the White House Innovation for Disaster Response & Recovery Initiative and managed strategic research investments in graph analytics, risk assessment, machine learning, data visualization, and distributed computing. Lee was previously Founding Executive Director of the National Science Foundation West Big Data Innovation Hub, where she and her team launched public-private partnerships with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Department of Homeland Security, and Census Bureau. Earlier in her career, she was a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), contributing to interagency initiatives through data.gov, challenge.gov, citizenscience.gov, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Science and Technology Council.

Meredith holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection. She has taught Human-Centered Design and Innovation at Stanford and in government, and continues to advise organizations with efforts in technology, data science, and multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Dr. Lee is a California Senate appointee to the Governing Board for the California Cradle-to-Career Data System and served on the California Blockchain Technology Working Group. She is Vice Chair of the California Water Data Consortium Board and an inaugural National Leadership Council member for the Society for Science and the Public. Her work has been featured by whitehouse.gov, ArsTechnica, The Washington Post, Forbes, WIRED, Harvard Data Science Review, Bloomberg, and Nature.

Contact information: mmlee@cawaterdata.org