Nicole M. Lee

Nicole M. Lee, Ph.D.

Computational behavioral neuroscientist & hardware tinkerer

I'm a neuroscientist in the ACC Lab (Adam Claridge-Chang) at Duke-NUS Medical School, where I completed my PhD and now continue as a Research Fellow, building optogenetic methods to study how small circuits in the Drosophila brain shape behavior.

Before the flies, I completed my B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, and worked on several projects: the biochemistry of collagen degradation, mTOR and kappa-opioid receptor signaling, asymmetric cell division, and cancer drug-resistance. Outside the lab, I paint 🎨, play games 🎮, and build apps 📱.

The neuroscience

Optogenetics for behavioral neuroscience, developing and applying light-driven tools to manipulate neural activity, including potassium channelrhodopsins and opto-GPCRs.

The nuts & bolts

Experimental hardware design, designing and prototyping custom rigs and hardware components for optogenetic stimulation and behavioral experiments.

The numbers

Estimation statistics, contributing to DABEST for effect sizes and confidence intervals over p-values.

Building open-source Python packages for data analysis and visualization.

DABEST 2.0 - out now in Nature Methods

Estimation graphics for multi-group comparisons. I built the proportion plot for binary data and ran the literature survey behind it.

Jul 2026Tool

VISET - interactive itemized set visualization

An nbdev Python package on GitHub for itemizing and comparing sets, not just viewing them interactively.

Jun 2026Paper

OPN3 - a light-activated opto-GPCR

A light-activated GPCR that switches neuromodulatory signaling on and off, so we can dissect how specific circuits in the brain shape behavior.