Lee Makowski received his B.S. at Brown University in Physics, and Masters and Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering. After doing postdoctoral research at Brandeis University in Structural Biology, he joined faculty of the College of Physician and Surgeons at Columbia University in the Biochemistry Department. He moved to Boston University as Professor of Physics and later accepted a position as Director of the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. In 1998 he joined the National Science Foundation where he was a Program Director first in the Biology Directorate and then in the Division of Materials Science. From 2000 until 2010 he was at Argonne National Laboratory, first as Biosciences Division Director and then as Senior Scientist. He moved to Northeastern in the fall of 2010. He is an author of over 100 scientific research papers and numerous review articles on innovative analyses of biophysical data with focus on x-ray and neutron scattering and x-ray imaging.