Edward A. Lee

Edward Ashford Lee (1957 - ) was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican father and a native of Kentucky. After a stint at boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, he went to Yale, where he discovered engineering and computer science. Completely seduced, he accepted a job at Bell Labs, who then paid for him to go to MIT for a masters degree. He returned to New Jersey to work at Bell Labs with some of the smartest people he had ever met. He met his future wife, Rhonda Righter, with whom he still shares his life, thoughts, and love. Bell Labs taught Lee that there would always be more to learn, so he bolted for Berkeley to get PhD. In 1986, he got his doctorate and accepted a faculty position at Berkeley, where he has been ever since. Lee has authored or coauthored more than 300 academic papers, several textbooks, and his first book intended for a general audience, Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology. This book is about engineering, but from a high-level viewpoint that tackles philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the coevolution of people and technology. Lee continues to run an active research program at Berkeley working with graduate students and developing software. The focus of his research is on cyber-physical systems, systems such as robots and self-driving cars that integrate computers with the physical world.