PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Professor of Pathobiology
Email: geelau@illinois.edu
Phone: (217) 333-5077
Fax: (217) 244-7421

Brief biography.  Gee came from Malaysia where he finished high school. He received his B.S. (1990) and M.S. (1992) degrees in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and PhD (1997) from Purdue University, studying the genetics and molecular pathogenesis of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea under Al Ellingboe and John Hamer, respectively. He did a 2-year postdoc with David Holden at the Imperial College School of Medicine, examining functional genomics of virulence in Streptococcus pneumoniae. He did a second postdoc with Laurence Rahme at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School studying modulation of Drosophila innate immunity by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Between 2002-2006 he was a research assistant professor under Frank McCormack at the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, studying lung-bacterial pathogen interactions. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006, where he is currently Professor of Pathobiology.