Lee Spector received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1992 under the guidance of Professor James Hendler. His dissertation, "Supervenience in Dynamic-World Planning," incorporated perspectives from several disciplines in the cognitive sciences to address issues in artificial intelligence.
After graduating from Maryland Lee joined the faculty of the interdisciplinary School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College, an innovative liberal arts college in Massachusetts. At Hampshire he held the MacArthur Chair, served as the elected faculty member of the Board of Trustees, served as the Dean of the School of Cognitive Science, and taught and conducted research in several areas including genetic and evolutionary computation, quantum computation, planning in dynamic environments, artificial intelligence education, artificial intelligence and neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence in the arts. He returned to Maryland for one year, to supervise Professor Hendler's lab while Professor Hendler was away on a Fulbright fellowship.
Lee moved from Hampshire College to Amherst College in 2019, where he is now the Class of 1993 Professor of Computer Science. In addition to continuing his research and teaching at Amherst College, he also runs a program on Artificial Intelligence in the Liberal Arts. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and member of the graduate faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Lee is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, and a member of the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation. He has won several awards and honors including the ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award, two gold medals in the "Humies" Awards for Human-Competitive Results Produced By Genetic And Evolutionary Computation, and the highest honor bestowed by the National Science Foundation for excellence in both teaching and research, the NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars.