Brian Lee
I'm a sophomore at Harvard, where I'm pursuing a concurrent Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science. My technical fascination lies in the architecture of intelligent systems; I'm particularly interested in the evolution of advanced artificial intelligence and its ability to distill meaning from vast landscapes of unstructured information.
To me, computer science is a subtle craft that balances the theoretical with the tangible; I’m constantly striving to understand how we can build a more intelligent digital infrastructure that is both robust and intuitively designed, seeking out problems that exist at the edge of computational possibility.
Always willing to chat, feel free to reach out!
Education
Harvard College
B.A. in Computer Science, intention to pursue concurrent M.S.
2024 — 2028
Belmont Hill School
High School Diploma, Summa Cum Laude
2018 — 2024
Experience
Research Fellow
Summer 2025Harvard Medical School, Dr. Susanne E. Churchill Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics
Highly selective (~5% acceptance rate) 9-week program engaging in intensive coursework and mentored research at the intersection of computer science and biomedicine. Mentored by Dr. Griffin Weber, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Addressed the challenge of scalable, high-fidelity narrative generation for thousands of faculty profiles on the Harvard Catalyst Profiles platform by architecting an end-to-end LLM-powered synthesis pipeline. Engineered a novel framework leveraging state-of-the-art transformer models to autonomously generate semantically rich, domain-specific research overviews with high factual consistency. Integrated DeepEval (LLM-as-a-judge) for fine-grained model benchmarking, enabling robust evaluation across dimensions of coherence, relevance, faithfulness, etc. Delivered the solution to senior leadership at the HMS Office of Faculty Affairs, resulting in formal validation of its effectiveness and interest in integrating the tool into official workflows for faculty promotion and CV generation. Designed and executed a novel experiment demonstrating that semantic similarity between LLM-generated research narratives is a significantly stronger predictor of future scientific collaboration than traditional metrics such as prior co-authorship or shared citations.
Research Intern
Summer 2022 - Fall 2024Harvard Medical School, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Worked under Dr. Isaac Kohane, Chair of Biomedical Informatics, and Dr. John Brownstein, Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Developed and evaluated a high-performance Natural Language Processing multi-class text classification model that enables accurate geoinference (inferring the precise geographical location) of unstructured free-text author affiliations. Built data processing pipeline to handle 52M+ records, implementing efficient data structures and optimizing for memory usage with Parquet file format; processed and analyzed large-scale bibliometric dataset using advanced data cleaning and validation techniques; engineered text preprocessing pipeline utilizing spaCy's named entity recognition (NER) for filtering and classifying organizational and geopolitical entities; implemented and benchmarked multiple text vectorization approaches (TF-IDF, Word2Vec, BERT embeddings) for feature extraction, optimizing for high-dimensional sparse data; evaluated and compared performance of various ML classifiers including LinearSVC, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and deep learning models (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU); achieved superior performance metrics compared to existing solutions through careful model selection and feature engineering; implemented custom evaluation metrics and validation approaches to assess model performance across multiple test datasets. Published article "Geoinference of Author Affiliations using NLP-based Text Classification" in Nature’s Scientific Reports as first author.
Awards & Achievements
John Harvard Scholar
details"Awarded to students in the top 5% of their class based on academic standing."
George Von L. Meyer III Memorial Prize
details"Awarded by vote of the faculty to that member of the graduating class who has evidenced outstanding interest in learning and who, by his contribution to the life of the School, has shown qualities of unselfish conduct, leadership, and integrity."
Brown Book Award
details"Given by the Associated Alumni of Brown University to that boy in the Fifth Form, chosen by the faculty, who best combines academic excellence with clarity in written and spoken expression."
Henry B. Sawyer Award
details"Given to the ideal sportsman whose emotions are controlled by a genuine love and respect for his fellow man as well as the game." (Awarded for both Crew and XC Skiing)
- 1x Gold Medal and 2x Silver Medals at the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association Championship
- Gold Medal and Course Record at the Head of the Charles with Henley Rowing Club's Men's Youth Coxed Quad
Maureen O'Donnell Book Award
details"Awarded by the American Classical League for four consecutive summa cum laude exams on the National Latin Examination."
- Advanced Poetry — Gold Medal
- Intermediate Reading Comprehension — Gold Medal
- Intermediate Latin — Perfect Score
- Beginning Latin — Gold Medal
- Introduction to Latin — Perfect Score
- Introduction to Attic Greek — Perfect Score
Ensemble Award
details"Awarded to those members of the Sixth Form who, by their interest and participation during their years at Belmont Hill, have contributed to the advancement and success of the Instrumental Ensemble Program."
Thomas Photography Prize
details"Awarded to that student whose work in photography has shown outstanding growth in photojournalism or artistic expression."
- National Gold Medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for Photography
- 2x Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for Photography
- 2x Silver Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for Photography
AIME Qualifier
detailsTop 5% on the AMC 12, qualifying for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination.
Cello Performance
detailsAssociate Principal Cellist of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (member from 2020-2024) led by Maestro Benjamin Zander, composed of high school and college conservatory musicians, international tours including a 6-city tour of Greece, a 7-city tour of South Africa, and a 5-city tour of Central Europe (Basel, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Berlin), three seasonal concerts at Symphony Hall each year performing with acclaimed professional soloists
- Grand Prize Winner of the Boston Pops Fidelity Investments Young Artists Competition
- Boston Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition Finalist and Honorable Mention
- Winner of the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra Michael H. Welles Young Soloist Competition
- Grand Prize of Senior Division at the Vision Strings and Piano Competition
- 1st chair and Perfect Score at the MMEA Northeastern District Senior Festival
- 1st place at the American Protégé International Competition of Romantic Music Intermediate Category
Projects
research-narrator
LLM-powered research narrative synthesis pipeline for Harvard Catalyst faculty profiles using Gemini and DeepEval with semantic similarity experiment predicting scientific collaboration.
brandley
Fully functional marketplace platform that manages the complete lifecycle of brand-influencer collaboration: from discovery and matching to campaign execution, messaging, and analytics.
winstead
Luxury editorial iOS app for capturing and celebrating daily victories with high-fashion magazine aesthetics, built with SwiftUI and Supabase.
affiliation-geoinference
Geoinference of author affiliations using NLP-based text classification with machine learning models including scikit-learn, TensorFlow/Keras, and PyTorch.