Dr. Kang Lee

Professor Kang Lee is a globally recognized scholar and member of the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Prof. Lee holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Moral Development and Developmental Neuroscience. Prof. Lee's acclaimed work has been in the areas of the development of deception (lying and cheating), face processing in children and adults, and the early development of racial bias and its reduction. Prof. Lee is a TED speaker. He is also one of the inventors of a contactless imaging methodology called transdermal optical imaging that has applications in wide areas including education, healthcare, and research.  

Professor Lee is considering admitting one MA student and one Ph.D. student who have existing skills in psychophysiology, machine learning, or programming (e.g., Python or R) to work with him on psychophysiological correlates of lying and cheating and their detection. He is also open to host postdoctoral students who have already secured external funding or are willing to work with him to apply for external funding to work on the topic.

* Lying & cheating in children and adults 

* Face processing in infants, children, and adults  

For nearly three decades, Professor Lee has used behavioral and neuroscience methods (e.g., EEG, fMRI, fNIRS) to examine the emergence and development of social cognition and social behavior and the underlying neural mechanisms.  He has two major foci of research. The first is the development of moral cognition and action with a specific focus on honesty and deception. For nearly three decades, he has studied how children learn to tell lie and cheat using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methodologies. His work has led to legal reforms in Canada. Since 2006, child witnesses under 14 years of age must follow a procedure based on the work from his lab before being admitted to testify in the criminal court in Canada. Currently, his lab is exploring the development of academic cheating and how to reduce it.   

The second research focus is the development of social perception with a specific focus on face processing. For over two decades, he has used behavioral and neuroscience methods (e.g., EEG, fMRI, fNIRS) to examine how infants, children, and adults process own- vs. other-race faces and the linkage between face perception and racial biases. Currently, his lab is exploring the emergence of racial biases in early childhood and effective and scalable methods to reduce them with last effects.  

Prof. Lee's work has received support from a variety of funding sources, including the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, the National Institute of Health of the United States, and the National Science of Foundation of China.