Donghoon Lee, PhD

Research & perspective

Decoding disease
at cellular resolution.

Donghoon Lee is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He directs the Single Cell Neurogenomics Group in the Center for Disease Neurogenomics. His group develops computational and machine learning methods for population-scale single-cell genomics and uses them to find the cell types, genes and regulatory programs behind neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders.

He is first and co-corresponding author of the PsychAD cross-disorder atlas (Nature, 2026), a single-nucleus map of 6.3 million nuclei from 1,494 donors, and of FreshMG (Nature Genetics, 2026), an atlas of human microglia and perivascular macrophages in aging and Alzheimer's disease. Both papers were cover stories in September 2026, and he made the Nature Genetics cover image himself.

He trained in computational biology with Mark Gerstein at Yale (PhD, 2019). There he built STARRPeaker for ENCODE, developed ESPRNN for splicing prediction and contributed to the ENCODE and Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortia. Before graduate school he was a senior software engineer at the National Center for Biotechnology Information and a scientist at the National Cancer Center in Korea. He holds BS and MS degrees in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.