Yen-Jie Lee PhD '11

Class of 1958 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics
Has pioneered studies of high-density QCD with electron-position annihilation data.
(617) 324-7418
Office: 24-413
Affiliated Center(s): MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science
Assistant: Alisa Cabral

Research Interests

Yen-Jie Lee is an experimental particle physicist in the field of proton-proton and heavy-ion physics. Utilizing the Large Hadron Colliders, Lee explores matter in extreme conditions, providing new insight into strong interactions and what might have existed and occurred at the beginning of the universe and in the neutron stars. His work on jets and heavy flavor particle production in nuclei collisions improves understanding of the quark-gluon plasma, predicted by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations, and the structure of heavy nuclei. He also pioneered studies of high-density QCD with electron-position annihilation data.

Yen-Jie Lee, associate professor at MIT, uses a bell lab machine to demonstrate the mathematical prediction for infinitely long coupled system. Learn more and enroll at https://www.edx.org/course/vibrations…
Courtesy of MITx Videos | YouTube

Biographical Sketch

Yen‐Jie Lee completed his undergraduate degree and Master’s in Physics at the National Taiwan University with the Belle collaboration and his doctoral work at MIT in 2011 under the supervision of Wit Busza. After postdoctoral work at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT, he completed a combined CERN and Marie Curie Fellowship at CERN from 2012 to 2013. He joined the MIT Physics faculty in September 2013. He served as one of the Heavy Ion Physics Group co-conveners in the CMS collaboration from 2014 to 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, he served as a heavy-ion physics executive board representative in the CMS collaboration. Lee is a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Prof. Lee received an Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2015, an NEC Corporation Fund Award from the MIT Research Support Committee, a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2016, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Physics in 2018.

Awards & Honors

  • 2020 // Buechner Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Advising, MIT
  • 2019 // Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
  • 2016 // Class of 1958 Career Development Professorship, MIT
  • 2016 // NEC Corporation Fund Award
  • 2016 // Sloan Research Fellowship
  • 2015 // DOE Early Career Award
  • 2012 // CERN Marie-Curie Co-fund Fellowship
  • 2012 // Infinite Kilometer Award, MIT School of Science
  • 2004 // Master Thesis Award, Physical Society of Taiwan

Key Publications

  • CMS Collaboration, Transverse momentum and pseudorapidity distributions of charged hadrons in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105 (2010) 022002 http://inspirehep.net/record/855299

  • CMS Collaboration, Observation and studies of jet quenching in PbPb collisions at nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy = 2.76 TeV, Phys. Rev. C84 (2011) 024906 http://inspirehep.net/record/889010

  • CMS Collaboration, Nuclear modification factor of D0 mesons in PbPb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV, Phys.Lett.B 782 (2018) 474-496