Almost everyone she knew growing up were laborers. Now she researches inactivity.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Health

Almost everyone she knew growing up were laborers. Now she researches inactivity.

Epidemiologist I-Min Lee has published hundreds of papers on exercise and heart health in her time with the Harvard Alumni Health Study and the Women’s Health Study

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

July 27, 2026

5 min read

Part of the Profiles of Progress series

I-Min Lee got used to being the odd one out at conferences when she first began researching the role of exercise in health and disease-prevention.

“A lot of people in this area were athletes in college, or they played a sport, or were ballet dancers,” said Lee, a physical activity epidemiologist. She recalled standing around feeling awkward while colleagues discussed marathon times.

Working out didn’t come naturally to Lee. While growing up in Malaysia in the 1960s and ’70s, just about everyone she knew labored under the hot tropical sun or as domestics. They got plenty of exercise. Every parent’s fondest wish was that their children would get desk jobs in air-conditioned comfort.

“If you had a seated job, you’d made it. You didn’t have to work in the fields,” she said.

Now a Harvard Medical School professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of epidemiology in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Lee got her desk job. But she’s also keenly aware of the potential drawbacks for health that can come from such a lifestyle.

“I don’t even have to get up to go to the fax machine anymore,” she said. “I can just sit and do everything on my phone or computer, and that’s really bad, I think.”

The principal investigator of the long-running Harvard Alumni Health Study and the Women’s Health Study, Lee has published some 650 research papers on associations between physical inactivity and noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancers; dose-response relationships…