Dr. Lee practiced plastic surgery in Boston and Chicago and was regularly listed locally and nationally as a leading surgeon. [13][14] He served as Director of Plastic Surgery at the West Roxbury VA Hospital (Massachusetts) , Director, University of Chicago's Burn Center, as well as for the Electrical Trauma Program.[15] In 2016 he was named a Senior Clinical Scholar Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence.[16] In 2020, he received the University of Chicago's Alumni Association Golden Key Award for outstanding service to the University.[17]
Dr. Lee has combined a clinical surgery practice[18] with his research efforts, primary in the areas of the molecular biophysics of cell injury resulting from physical trauma such as burns and electrical injury.[1][2] He has served on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyHarvard University, University of Chicago and at the Chicago Electrical Trauma Research Institute. Mostly, that effort has been focused focuses on advancing the care of trauma injuries by mimicking a few basic behaviors of natural proteins that repair cell membrane. Several discoveries have emerged from that effort.[19] In addition, Dr. Lee's students and residents developed and published independently validated therapies to tc control scar formation after traumatic injury.[11][20] Lee is recognized for discovering the application of certain classes of amphiphilic block copolymers to mimic several fundamental protective processes of natural stress proteins in cells that perform cellular self-repair capability following injury.[21]
In recent years, Lee's research focuses on developing methods to assess and improve patient fitness for surgery, development of therapies to enhance survival following trauma or radiation, and to integrate control systems science into pharmacology [6] Dr. Lee's patents[7] have led to the founding of Avocet Polymer Technologies, Inc.[8] , Maroon Biotech Corp [9], and Electrokinetic Signal Research, Inc.[10] all of Chicago, Illinois.
Raphael C Lee; Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer; Kathleen M. Kelley, eds. (1994). Electrical Injury: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Prevention, Therapy & Rehabilitation. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN0-89766-864-2.
Chin-tu Chen; Raphael C Lee; J-X Shih; Min-Ha Zhong, eds. (1999). Occupational Electrical Injury and Safety. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN1-57331-232-0.
Raphael C Lee; Florin Despa; Kimm Jon Hamann, eds. (2005). Cell injury: mechanisms, responses, and repair. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN978-1-57331-616-3.
Raphael C Lee and Anna Chien The Doctor's Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis. (Book Review) Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - Volume 48, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 616–618
M. Capelli-Schellpfeffer, M. and R.C.Lee, "Electrical Shock" in Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Webster, J.G., Ed., John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998
Raphael C Lee, "Convolving Engineering and Medical Pedagogies for Training of Tomorrow's Health Care Professionals" IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2013) 60:599, [DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2013.2243911]
Author or coauthor of more than 275 journal publications and book chapters [34]
^Raphael C Lee; Florin Despa; Kimm Jon Hamann, eds. (2005). Cell injury: mechanisms, responses, and repair. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN978-1-57331-616-3.