Principal Investigator (PI)

Dongtak Lee, Ph.D.

Dr. Dongtak Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Bioengineering at Incheon National University. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Korea University and completed postdoctoral training in nanomedicine and gene delivery at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, in the laboratories of Dr. Jeffrey Karp and Dr. Nitin Joshi. His research engineers nanoparticle–biological interactions to build precision drug delivery systems and therapeutic platforms for central nervous system (CNS) diseases, bridging biomaterials, nanotechnology, and molecular biology. Building on earlier work on nanoparticle-based drug screening platforms for amyloid oligomers in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and on antiviral drug discovery, Dr. Lee's current research centers on lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-based gene delivery to the brain, including intranasal strategies for non-invasive CNS targeting and DNA-barcoded LNP platforms for high-throughput in vivo screening and cell-type-specific targeting. His work has been published in top-tier journals, including Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Advanced Materials, and Aggregate, with more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and 14+ granted and pending patents. Dr. Lee has received awards including the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Scientist Fellowship, the KoreaBio President Award in the Korean Biopharmaceutical Competition. His program is supported by competitive grants — as principal investigator, the NRF Excellent Early-Career Researcher Program (우수신진연구) and the Brain Science Leading Convergence Technology Development Program (뇌과학선도융합기술개발), and as co-investigator, the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) PD Therapeutic Pipeline Program. He is also committed to mentoring the next generation of biomedical engieers.