Seong-Whan Lee is the Hyundai-Kia Motor Chair Professor at Korea University, where he is the head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering and the director of the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Engineering.

He received the B.S. degree in computer science and statistics from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1986 and 1989, respectively.

From February 1989 to February 1995, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, Korea. In March 1995, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University, Seoul, Korea, and now he is the tenured full professor. In 2001, he stayed at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT as a visiting professor.

A Fellow of the IEEE, IAPR, and Korean Academy of Science and Technology, he has served several professional societies as chairman or governing board member. He was the founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition and has been an Associate Editor of several international journals: Pattern Recognition, ACM Trans. on Applied Perception, IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing, Image and Vision Computing, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and International Journal of Image and Graphics.

His research interests include pattern recognition, computer vision, and brain engineering. He has more than 250 publications in international journals and conference proceedings, and authored 10 books.