Catherine Lee's research areas include race and ethnicity, gender, immigration, law and society, and science and medicine. She has pursued these diverse interests using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate immigrant exclusion, science and health policy, and racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. She is currently finishing a book on family reunification in immigration policy from the mid-nineteenth century to today and examining the construction of race and ethnicity in biomedical research and health policy.

Professor Lee will be a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2009-2010. Prior to joining the department, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy at the University of Michigan. She was also a guest scholar at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego and a dissertation fellow of the Social Sciences Research Council's Sexuality Research Fellowship Program.