Dr Lee Coffey is a Lecturer and Researcher in Molecular Biology with Biopharmaceutical Science at the Department of Science, SETU and is a Principal Investigator at the PMBRC where he is leading the Molecular Biotechnology and Biopharmaceutical Research Group. Lee has attracted over €2 million research funding including Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland funding as PI. He is/has supervised fourteen PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers to date. Lee has led his research through a strong commercial route, authoring 25 publications and numerous inventions, with 5 patents currently pending across multiple territories. Through SETU, Lee has licensed over 1400 biological research technologies to global multi-€B companies. He is the CEO and founder of a spin-out company BIOENZ Technologies Ltd. which has exclusively licensed approx. 4000 biological research technologies and inventions to date.

Lee was awarded the 2022 Established Researcher Category in the SETU Research Excellence Awards, was a National Forum Teaching Hero Award Recipient in 2021 and 2020, has been co-awarded the Technology Ireland Awards 2019 – Outstanding Academic Achievement of the Year and also won the SETU Postgraduate Supervision Excellence Award in 2016.

Lee's research interests include the use of molecular biology techniques to; discover and enhance biopharmaceutical proteins and enhance gene therapy solutions, including gene screening, expression, genome editing, synthetic biology, directed evolution; industrial enzymes for food/feed/pharma/health/industrial applications; biological  molecular communications for DNA data storage and biological health monitoring.