Shelley Lee

About

Shelley Lee is the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and the Humanities at Brown University. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the histories of immigration, race relations, Asian Americans, and U.S. cities during the twentieth century. She has published extensively on these topics, including books such as Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the American Dream (2022), A New History of Asian America (2013, with a second edition published in 2026), and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (2011). Her articles have appeared in various academic journals, and she has contributed to online venues discussing college student activism and the Me Too movement in higher education. Currently, she is working on a new book about the history of Asian undocumented immigration and the bureaucratic state in the 20th and early 21st centuries. As a Humanities Initiative Scholar in Residence at the Cogut Institute, she leads a multi-year project titled 'The Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies' and co-hosts the podcast 'The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good.' She also co-leads a working group on Asian Pacific American and Diaspora Studies at Brown University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Gastroenterology
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Medicine
• Surgery
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Thalamocortical Mechanisms Regulating the Relationship between Transient Beta Events and Human Tactile Perception

  Cerebral Cortex · 2021 · 47 citations

  Transient neocortical events with high spectral power in the 15-29 Hz beta band are among the most reliable predictors of sensory perception. Prestimulus beta event rates in primary somatosensory cortex correlate with sensory suppression, most effectively 100-300 ms before stimulus onset. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this perceptual association are unknown. We combined human magnetoencephalography (MEG) measurements with biophysical neural modeling to test potential cellular and cir…

  DOI

• Deterministic Preprocessing and Interpretable Fuzzy Banding for Cost-per-Student Reporting from Extracted Records

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Administrative extracts are often exchanged as spreadsheets and may be read as reports in their own right during budgeting, workload review, and governance discussions. When an exported workbook becomes the reference snapshot for such decisions, the transformation can be checked by recomputation against a clearly identified input. A deterministic, rule-governed, file-based workflow is implemented in cad_processor.py. The script ingests a Casual Academic Database (CAD) export workbook and aggrega…

  PublisherOA PDF

• GPT-4o Lacks Core Features of Theory of Mind

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-02-12

  preprintOpen access

  Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess a Theory of Mind (ToM)? Research into this question has focused on evaluating LLMs against benchmarks and found success across a range of social tasks. However, these evaluations do not test for the actual representations posited by ToM: namely, a causal model of mental states and behavior. Here, we use a cognitively-grounded definition of ToM to develop and test a new evaluation framework. Specifically, our approach probes whether LLMs have a coherent, do…

  PublisherDOI

• GPT-4o Lacks Core Features of Theory of Mind

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-02-12

  articleOpen access

  Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess a Theory of Mind (ToM)? Research into this question has focused on evaluating LLMs against benchmarks and found success across a range of social tasks. However, these evaluations do not test for the actual representations posited by ToM: namely, a causal model of mental states and behavior. Here, we use a cognitively-grounded definition of ToM to develop and test a new evaluation framework. Specifically, our approach probes whether LLMs have a coherent, do…

  PublisherOA PDF

• Deterministic Preprocessing and Interpretable Fuzzy Banding for Cost-per-Student Reporting from Extracted Records

  Open MIND · 2026-03-05

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Administrative extracts are often exchanged as spreadsheets and may be read as reports in their own right during budgeting, workload review, and governance discussions. When an exported workbook becomes the reference snapshot for such decisions, the transformation can be checked by recomputation against a clearly identified input. A deterministic, rule-governed, file-based workflow is implemented in cad_processor.py. The script ingests a Casual Academic Database (CAD) export workbook and aggrega…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Wael F. Asaad

  University Hospital of North Tees

  268 shared

• Umer Akbar

  Brown University

  142 shared

• Peter M. Lauro

  University of Pennsylvania

  129 shared

• Stephanie R. Jones

  Brown University

  64 shared

• Daniel E Amaya

  Allen Institute for Brain Science

  55 shared

• Robert Law

  Baylor College of Medicine

  42 shared

• David D. Liu

  Brown University

  41 shared

• Samuel A. Neymotin

  Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research

  24 shared

Education

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience

  Boston University

  2012

• B.S., Physics

  Trinity University

  2004

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians…
• Huntington Library Summer Fellowship (2015)

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Kiana Murphyh-45
• Evelyn Hu-DeHarth-20
• José Itzigsohnh-20