- Director's Office
Michelle K. Lee is the Vice President of Amazon Web Services Machine Learning Solutions Lab where she leads a team and business whose mission is to work work with companies and organizations from all sectors to solve their business needs using AWS's cloud-based, artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. Prior to that, Ms. Lee held an appointment as the Herman Phleger Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School where she taught on disruptive technologies (artificial intelligence and driverless cars) and their impact on existing laws and regulations. Ms. Lee also served as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), one of the largest intellectual property offices in the world. In this role, she was the chief executive of a 13,000 person agency with a budget of $3.4 billion and the principal advisor to the President, through the Secretary of Commerce, on domestic and international intellectual property policy. She is the first woman to serve as Director in the country’s 220+ year history, and is an advocate for women and girls in science, technology, engineering, math and computers.
Before joining the USPTO, Ms. Lee spent most of her career in technology, business and law. Ms. Lee was an executive at Google, serving as Deputy General Counsel, and a partner at the Silicon Valley law firm of Fenwick & West. Before this, Ms. Lee worked as a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She holds a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. Ms. Lee also served as a independent director public and private company boards including for alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM) and Nauto, Inc.