Biography

Kwan Min Lee (이관민, Ph.D., Stanford) is the inaugural Korea Foundation Endowed Chair Professor in Contemporary Korean Society and New Media, and the Director of the UX (User Experience) Lab, Human-AI Interaction Lab (HAIL), and Contemporary Korea Studies Lab (KSL) at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also holds courtesy joint professorships at the School of Computer Science and Engineering (College of Computing and Data Science) and the Nanyang Business School at NTU.

Previously, Lee was Vice President and Director of User Experience (UX) at Samsung Electronics, where he spearheaded UX innovation for the Visual Display Division, including the award-winning Samsung Smart TV Smart Hub and Smart Controller. He also founded and directed Samsung’s Creative Lab (C-Lab), the most successful internal incubation and open innovation initiative at Samsung. Prior to Samsung and NTU, Lee was the founding director of the Interaction Science Research Center and founding WCU Professor at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), and taught for 12 years as a tenured professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC).

Lee specializes in UX research and design, open innovation, and human-machine interaction, encompassing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and Human-AI Interaction (HAI). His research findings have been featured widely by international media including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC News, USA Today, and major Asian news agencies.

He has secured more than 12 million US dollars in competitive research grants from the National Research Foundation, National Science Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, Singapore Ministry of Education, Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motors, and international agencies. Lee is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), the highest recognition of lifetime scholarly contributions in the discipline, and one of the most frequently cited scholars globally in Communication and UX (cited nearly 13,000 times on Google Scholar).