Frank Lee, PhD is a Professor in the Digital Media Department at the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University. Dr. Lee is a CVP Affiliate and collaborates with Dr. Stephen Leff at CVP on integrating games and gamification into bullying prevention and patient care.
Frank Lee, PhD is a Professor in the Digital Media Department at the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University. Dr. Lee is a CVP Affiliate. He co-founded Drexel’s nationally recognized Game Design Program, ranked among the top in the U.S., and is the founder and director of the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, an educational incubator that mentors students in launching their own game companies.
His work has received national and international recognition, extensive media coverage, and numerous awards. Notably, his 2014 Skyscraper Tetris installation earned a Guinness World Record for the Largest Architectural Videogame Display and was featured in over 1,500 articles worldwide. Dr. Lee has been named one of Polygon’s 50 Most Admirable Gaming People (2014), Hacker of the Year at the Philadelphia Geek Awards (2013), and one of the Smartest People in Philadelphia by Philadelphia Magazine (2012).
Although Dr. Lee's academic background is in Psychology (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University) and Cognitive Science (B.A., UC Berkeley), his research and creative work over the past two decades have focused on digital media, game design, and serious games. As principal investigator or co-investigator on numerous grants from industry, foundations, and government agencies, I’ve led many projects that develop game-based applications for health and education. This includes close collaboration with Dr. Stephen Leff at the Center for Violence Prevention at CHOP on integrating games and gamification into bullying prevention and patient care.
PhD, Carnegie Mellon University (Cognitive Psychology), 2000
BA, U.C. Berkeley, Cognitive Science, 1994
Professor, Digital Media Department, Drexel University
Affiliate, Center for Violence Prevention, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Director, Entrepreneurial Game Studio, Drexel University
Member, Association for Computing Machinery
Member, International Game Developer Association
Member, Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association
Visiting Fellow, Sogang University, South Korea
Inaugural Presidential Fellow, Drexel University
Executive Member, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
Fellowship Mentor Award, Drexel University
World Record, Guinness World Record
Çakir NA, Çakir MP, Lee FJ. (2021). We Game on Skyscrapers: The Effects of an Equity-Informed Game Design Workshop on Students’ Computational Thinking Skills and Perceptions of Computer Science. Educational Technology Research and Development. 69, 2683–2703.
Kable JW, Caulfield MK, Falcone M, McConnell M, Bernardo L, Pathasarathi T, Cooper N, Ashare RL, Audrain-McGovern J, Hornik R, Diefenbach P, Lee FJ, Lerman C. (2017). No Effect of Commercial Cognitive Training on Brain Activity, Choice Behavior, or Cognitive Performance. Journal of Neuroscience, 37 (31) 7390-7402.
Çakir NA, Gass AB, Foster, A, Lee FJ. (2017). Development of a Game-Design Workshop to Promote Young Girls' Interest Towards Computing Through Identity Exploration. Computers & Education.
Çakir MP, Çakir NA, Ayez H, Lee FJ. (2016). Behavioral and Neural Effects of Game-Based Learning on Improving Computational Fluency with Numbers: An Optical Brain Imaging Study. Zeitschrift für Psychologie.
Lee FJ and Anderson JR (2001). Does Learning a Complex Task Have to be Complex? A Study in Learning Decomposition. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 267-316.