Dr. Jay M. Lee is an accomplished thoracic oncologist who serves as the Surgical Director of the Thoracic Oncology Program and the Robert G. Kardashian Center for Esophageal Health at UCLA. He is also an Associate Professor of Surgery (Tenure Track) at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

Dr. Lee received his medical degree from UCLA and completed training in General Surgery at Georgetown and Duke University Medical Centers. He then went on to complete a Thoracic Research Fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and received Thoracic Surgery training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital Boston at Harvard Medical School.

His research focuses on translational trials involving investigator-initiated immunotherapy in human lung cancer and modulation of the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. He is the Principal Investigator of the “Combined Gene modified dendritic cell therapy and PD-1 inhibition for lung cancer” trial at UCLA. Dr. Lee is on the Steering/Executive Committee of several neoadjuvant trials in resectable non-small cell lung cancer, and is an author on numerous peri-operative clinical trials.

Dr. Lee is Board-certified by the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Thoracic Surgery. He is a member of many professional organizations, and serves on leadership committees for the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer. He also serves on several editorial boards of prestigious journals.