Dr. Edmund W. J. Lee is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), where he currently serves as the Programme Leader for the Master of Arts in Communication and New Media (MACNM). He is also the Co-Programme Chair of the “Wearables, Sensors, and Imaging” cluster (Cluster 3) at the Institute of Digital Medicine, and the Residence Master of Jockey Club Humanity Hall (Hall 1).
Prior to his appointment at CityUHK, he was an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where he also served as Assistant Director of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet (IN-cube).
Dr. Lee received his PhD from the WKWSCI at NTU in 2018. He was a recipient of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) International Postdoctoral Fellowship (HIPF) administered by NTU and the Ministry of Education. Under this fellowship, he held a joint postdoctoral research fellow appointment at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
As a public health communication scientist, Dr. Lee’s research focuses on developing and using digital health technologies to address health inequalities, and on how to take advantage of digital traces, such as data from wearables, smartphones, social media, and electronic health records, intelligently and ethically to understand and improve public health outcomes. To date, he has secured more than HKD 9 million in research funding as Principal Investigator from various external agencies and organizations to develop inclusive digital health technologies and ecosystems.
Dr. Lee has published in several top-tier journals such as Health Communication, the Journal of Health Communication, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Medical Internet Research, New Media & Society, Computers in Human Behavior, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Science Communication, and Journal of Nanoparticle Research. He also serves as Associate Editor of JMIR Infodemiology.
Beyond his academic work, Dr. Lee has strong industry ties and has collaborated with several multinational corporations (MNCs) from the U.S. and Europe, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and various government agencies in Singapore. He previously served as a Global Future Council Fellow at the World Economic Forum, working with global industry thought leaders to advise on the global agenda for responsible big data use. His research has won several prestigious international awards, including the top published research paper award from the International Communication Association in 2019 and the McQuail Award 2018 from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) for the best article advancing communication theory. For his scholarly contributions, he was conferred the title of McQuail Honorary Fellow by ASCoR in 2020.
Dr. Lee also teaches and conducts training on health communication at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and previously at Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore.
Edmund W. J. Lee 