Dr. Joseph Robert Lee is an academic clinical surgeon with nearly two decades of experience in complex hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) surgery, abdominal transplantation, graduate medical education, and translational research. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Surgery at East Tennessee State University’s Quillen College of Medicine, where he has practiced since 2012. His clinical expertise includes the management of benign and malignant liver, pancreas, and biliary disease. Over his career, he has performed more than 100 pancreaticoduodenectomies and over 300 laparoscopic microwave ablations of hepatic tumors.

From 2014 to 2021, Dr. Lee directed the ACGME-accredited General Surgery Residency Program at ETSU. During his tenure, he developed educational curricula, established training policies, and certified residents for board eligibility. Under his leadership, the program achieved perfect ACGME reviews for three consecutive years. He was elected as an American Board of Surgery Certification Examiner in 2016 and served as a founding member of the Diversity Task Force of the Association of Program Directors in Surgery in 2017. In 2018, he was honored with the program’s Faculty Member of the Year Award.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Lee was an abdominal transplant surgeon with Mountain States Health Alliance (2006–2011), performing over 100 kidney transplants, 15 pancreas transplants, more than 50 laparoscopic living donor nephrectomies, and over 100 liver and kidney procurement surgeries. He completed his HPB and abdominal transplant fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (2004–2006), following general surgery residencies at Albert Einstein Medical Center (1998–2001) and Drexel University College of Medicine (2001–2004).

A dedicated clinical investigator, Dr. Lee is a co-investigator on a DOD-funded project developing MET-targeted CAR-T cell therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma and collaborates on research involving engineered exosomes for CRISPR-based targeting of HBV-infected cells. He has published extensively in surgical and translational science journals and serves as Editor-in-Chief of two STATPearls surgical review volumes.

Dr. Lee is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and holds active medical licenses in Tennessee and California. He continues to apply his clinical, scientific, and educational expertise toward advancing patient care and the development of innovative therapeutic approaches.