Sung-Ju Lee received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2000. He has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department of KAIST since 2015. Before joining KAIST, he spent 15 years in the industry in the Silicon Valley; he was a Principal Research Scientist and Distinguished Mobility Architect at Hewlett-Packard Company, and a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Narus, Inc., which is now part of Symantec. His research interests lie in mobile computing, wireless networking, HCI, ubiquitous computing, and network security.

He won the HP CEO Innovation Award in 2010 as part of and the chief architect of the mega-scale wireless sensor networking team. This award recognizes the people behind the most innovative products that HP has brought to market and the winners are nominated by executives in HP businesses. He is also the winner of the test-of-time paper award at ACM WiNTECH 2016 and the best paper award at IEEE ICDCS 2015. He actively serves on the organizing and technical program committee of leading networking conferences. He was the General Chair of the 20th-anniversary version of ACM MobiCom (2014) and co-TPC chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2016. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.