Jennifer 8. Lee received her degree in applied math and eco­nom­ics at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, where she was vice pres­i­dent of The Har­vard Crim­son. She then went to Bei­jing Uni­ver­sity for a year on a Harvard-Yenching fel­low­ship and stud­ied inter­na­tional relations.

She played a lead role in the Knight News Chal­lenge, a $25-mil­lion ini­tia­tive to sup­port news inno­va­tion, and was a pro­ducer in News Foo camp, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between O’Reilly Media, Google, and Knight Foun­da­tion, and has worked to bring jour­nal­ism con­tent to the SXSW Inter­ac­tive.

In addition, she is one of the lead orga­niz­ers of Hacks/Hackers, a rapidly expand­ing group that brings tech­nol­o­gists and jour­nal­ists together, as well as a trustee of the Awe­some Food chapter of the Awe­some Foun­da­tion, which gives micro­grants to fur­ther awe­some­ness in the universe.

She sits on boards of The Asian Amer­i­can Writ­ers’ Work­shop, the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integrity, the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, and the Nie­man Foun­da­tion. In addition, she is a mem­ber of the New York Pub­lic Library’s Young Lions Committee and the Public Radio International digital advisory committee.

She was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, where she cov­ered tech­nol­ogy, Wash­ing­ton, crime, poverty, and cul­ture. She is the author of The For­tune Cookie Chron­i­cles, on how Chi­nese food is all-American, which has been featured on the New York Times bestseller list, on TED.com, and the Colbert Report.

NPR has called her a “con­cep­tual scoop artist.” She was user 1324 on Face­book and has her own ver­sion of the red­dit alien (also known as “snoo”). She was listed in the Esquire “Women We Love” issue in 2003. She has a worldy well-traveled pur­ple hippo named Hubba Bubba, whose adventures can be found at roaminghubba.com.