Student of the Year Award: Alec Lee (Biotechnology)

Alec is the kind of person who makes change happen. In 2007 he co-founded a company, MCAT Question a Day, which provides free test prep services to pre-medical students preparing for the rigorous MCAT examination. Their website launched in 2008 and since then has grown to serve nearly 80,000 users per month. The brand is now licensed to an iPhone application developer and a book of past MCAT questions has been published. Alec is also the co-founder of the UBC-BCIT Biotechnology Club and he has served on the executive team of the Student Biotechnology Network. Alec has advocated for students throughout his undergraduate career, serving as the Student Representative for the Biotechnology program while at BCIT and serving on a BC government committee as a voting student representative.

In 2009, Alec was selected as one of 50 presenters, from over 1000 candidates, at the Education Without Borders International Student Conference in Dubai where he discussed the potential humanitarian uses of genetically modified foods. Recently, he traveled to western Kenya where he assisted a small ceramic water filter factory in its final phase before full-scale production. While in Kenya, Alec decided to found a student organization called Path 2 Prosperity (P2P) which is currently collecting donated education supplies and fundraising $10,000 to ship the supplies in a container to Kiminini, the village where he was based, in May 2011. The donated items will help furnish the library and computer lab of a local primary school where three-quarters of the students are orphans.

During his four co-op work terms, Alec has worked on a range of projects from researching insects and transgenic trees, to market research helping a small herb-grower's cooperative increase profits, to corporate research developing high-value green products to displace petroleum use. His third co-op work term was with the pilot program iClip (Interdisciplinary Clean-Tech Internship Program). The purpose of this program was to create opportunities where students of various backgrounds can work together on projects for industry. He returned to Lignol and the Integrative Biosciences Research Cluster (IBRC), but this time, instead of working in the lab, he conducted market research. For Lignol he assessed the viability of pursuing a particular application for one of their core product lines. At IBRC he worked on a client assignment to develop prototype products and assess their viability for delivery to market. This co-op placement confirmed Alec’s career direction where he hopes to one day work with scientific innovators and impact how they do business.

Alec is currently finishing his 5th year of the Honours Biotechnology program and minoring in Philosophy. His next undertaking will be at Harvard Business School where he has been admitted to the MBA program. The combination of his motivation and ambition, ability to contribute positively to his community, and his philosophy of “making things happen”, is why Alec Lee is the co-recipient of the 2010 Student of the Year.