Yung S. Lie, PhD, is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides today’s best young scientists with funding to pursue innovative cancer research. Dr. Lie joined the Foundation in 2008 as Scientific Director, was promoted to Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer in 2014, and began her current role in December 2018. Her goals are to foster new generations of scientists, enabling them to explore novel ideas and take risks, and to fill the gaps in traditional research funding that threaten future breakthroughs.

Yung is responsible for providing strategic leadership of the Foundation by working with the Board of Directors and senior staff team to establish mission-driven, long-range goals, strategies, plans and policies, while also executing short-term goals. This includes managing the scientific award programs portfolio (approximately $20M annually), organizational budget (approximately $26M for FY 2020) and finances, fundraising (including individual major donor relationships, corporate and foundation relations, special events, Broadway Tickets), communications/marketing, and operations. In addition, she conducts regular evaluations to measure the success of the organization.

Dr. Lie is a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Research Alliance, a group of non-profit funders of health research, and of the Chemical Probes Portal, designed to change the way scientists find and use small-molecule reagents called chemical probes in biomedical research and drug discovery, increase research reproducibility and accelerate the discovery science that informs the generation of new therapeutics.

She received her BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California at Berkeley and earned her PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. Following graduate school, Yung worked as a bioinformatics consultant at Celera/Applied Biosystems, contributing to the Human Genome Project. She completed postdoctoral research in neuroscience as a Damon Runyon Fellow at the University of California at San Francisco and at The Rockefeller University.