Claire Lee

Dr. Claire S. Lee is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell). She is a Member of the Center for Internet Security and Forensics Education and Research (iSAFER), a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies and the Center for Public Opinion, and a Core Personnel of the Center for Asian American Studies at UMass Lowell. Dr. Lee is a Donahue Ethics Fellow (2021-2024) and a 2022-2023 U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar, Center for Strategic and International Studies Korea Chair & USC.

She is a member of MassCyberCenter and is also a founding member and a researcher of Cybercrime Investigation & Cybersecurity Lab (CIC) at Boston University. She serves as an academic editor of PLOS One and an editor of the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime (IJCIC). She has worked in the educational, media and legal sectors in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei and Seoul, and for the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), one of the leading think tanks in South Korea. She worked for the Division of International Cooperation at the Korean Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation and Tembusu College and Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She was a volunteer instructor for the Prison Teaching Initiative in Incheon, South Korea.

Cybercrime is an emerging, growing field of study within criminology. With technological advancement, we will see new and traditional cybercrimes taking place more frequently in the future. As a young scholar and an educator, I started to take part in researching, teaching, and collaborating with criminologists, social scientists, and computer scientists in this field. As the field of cybercrime/cybersecurity is inherently technical, we need to bridge the gap between criminologists/social scientists and computer scientists/security researchers to study these important phenomena and promptly mitigate potential cybercrime risks. To that end, she, as the only social scientist at UML’s iSAFER, am collaborating with computer scientists on cybersecurity education and scholarship, and privacy research among others. Another important issue in cybercrime/cybersecurity is the gender gap. In her ongoing collaboration with computer scientists, we are emphasizing the valuable role of young females in cybercrime/cybersecurity and how to educate and train them to be cyber-resilient.

Her research expertise expands into two areas: (1) Cyber and digital (i.e., deviance and crime in cyberspace (cyberterrorism, cyberpolicing, transnational cybercrime), digital sociology (datafication, big data, digital ethics, IT policy), which was expanded from and combined with her previous research on sociology of media, culture, ICT and (2) Global media and im/migration (cross-border mobilities of people, knowledge, culture). While she’s developing courses and research projects on big data, linking online and offline behaviors, she is currently interested in understanding mechanisms and networks of deviant behaviors at state- and individual-levels that are facilitated by cyber-resources and/or are located in cyberspace. She received several federal, international funding including the United States’ Department of State and the National Security Agency, the Korea Foundation, the Overseas Koreans Foundation, and the National Research Foundation of Korea. Her recent CV is available upon request. To see her up-to-date list of publicatsion, please visit Dr. Lee’s Google Scholar profile.

As a dedicated teacher-scholar, she is interested in and practices connective learning in her classroom, which is also being translated into her research. In this connection, she received innovative teaching grants (for big data and statistics courses) at her previous institution. She is a recipient of an Outstanding Teaching Award in 2022.

She is open to (co-)supervising Ph.D. students in various fields, including cybercrime, cybersecurity, social media/Internet, and terrorism, among other areas.