Dr. Kyung Jae Lee is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at University of Houston (UH). She holds Ph.D. degree of Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University (2014), and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2015-2017) before she joined the UH in 2017. At UH, she has been developing her research program focusing on subsurface fluid-rock interactions and leading the research projects on clean energy transition, including the CAREER Award granted by National Science Foundation, entitled “Identifying a New Source of Lithium for Sustainable and Renewable Energy Storage.” Here, Dr. Lee is developing a transformative framework for characterizing lithium in petroleum source rock brines through experimental-and-computational approaches, thus laying the foundation for converting produced water from shale plays into a sustainable source of lithium.