Dr James Lee
Update your information and activate your profile
Professional statement
Dr James Lee is a leading consultant gastroenterologist with over 20 years of experience, based in London. He holds expertise in ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, IBD-U, checkpoint inhibitor induced colitis, microscopic colitis and coeliac disease.
He practises at the Royal Free Hospital and leads a research group as a clinician scientist at the Francis Crick Institute. A highly regarded authority on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Dr Lee is frequently invited to deliver lectures nationally and internationally. He is also an active participant in the UK and International IBD Genetics Consortia.
Dr Lee studied medicine at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2004 as the top student in his class, earning the George Pickering Prize. He later completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2008–2011). Following his doctorate, he undertook clinical training in gastroenterology at Cambridge as a clinical lecturer, and in 2015, he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship. This fellowship allowed him to spend time at Harvard University before he returned to Cambridge in 2018 to establish a research group at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. In 2021, he joined the Francis Crick Institute to lead a research team investigating the mechanisms of autoimmune diseases, including IBD, and to work on developing new therapies.
A recognised thought leader in IBD research, Dr Lee has made significant contributions to understanding why patients with the same disease often have different outcomes, with a strong emphasis on translating his research to improve patient care. In 2014, he was named the inaugural “Young Gastroenterologist of the Year” by the British Society of Gastroenterology in recognition of his clinical and translational research. Since then, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Julia Bodmer Award from the European Federation of Immunogenetics (2017), the Sir Francis Avery-Jones Medal from the British Society of Gastroenterology (2018), the United European Gastroenterology Rising Star Award (2018), and the distinguished Lister Prize (2021).