Lillian Lee, the Charles Roy Davis Professor in the departments of computer science and information science in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has been selected as the winner of the 2021 Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. Professor Lee is being honored for her extended service to the Transactions of the ACL (TACL), which has become, along with Computational Linguistics, “one of the most influential publication venues in the field.” Dr. Lee was appointed editor-in-chief of TACL in 2013 and remained in that role until 2019.
As noted by the awards committee, “her tireless work was essential to all aspects of TACL’s proper and successful functioning. She played a crucial role both in routine day-to-day tasks, as well as a leadership and strategic planning role in defining TACL policies and setting it up for continued future growth.” In the process, she “transformed the journal from its initial stages of development” into the “well-organized operation” it is today.
Professor Lee received her undergraduate degree at Cornell University, where he majored in math and computer science. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Harvard University. Dr. Lee joined the faculty of the computer science department at Cornell University in 1997.