Prof. James Z. Lee obtained his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 1983 and became a faculty member in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences in California Institute of Technology for two decades. Afterwards, he served at the University of Michigan and held the Directorship of the Center for Chinese Studies of the University until 2008. He then joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he was the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science from 2009 to 2018. As an eminent scholar in humanities and social science, Prof. Lee’s research covers a wide range of disciplines, including Chinese history, Chinese society and economy, comparative demography and sociology of populations, historical sociology, genealogy and health.

Prof. Lee received an extensive list of prizes and awards including the Tsinghua Journal Parkson Best Article Award (2015), the Best Book in Population Studies Award, Japanese Population Association (2012) and two American Sociological Association section best book awards (2000 and 2005). He was also a founding editor of a refereed journal Late Imperial China, a lead editor of the MIT Series in Eurasian Population and Family History (2002 – 2014), and a member in the editorial boards of many prime academic publications. Prof. Lee was also a winner of the highly prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2004) and Peking University Changjiang Scholar (2006 – 2010).