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Professor Kang Lee, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair and the world’s foremost authority on childhood dishonesty, has been named winner of the 2023 Insight Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Announced today as part of the Council’s Impact Awards, the recognizes outstanding achievement arising from a single or multiple SSHRC-funded initiatives. It is given to an individual or a team whose initiatives have significantly contributed to knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.

“Professor Lee’s research has made a broad impact across critical areas in education, and his exceptional scholarship, teaching, and mentoring of educational researchers are remarkable contributions to the field, to OISE, and to U of T.  He is highly deserving of this Insight Award, a prestigious honour for an outstanding professor,” says Professor Erica N. Walker, Dean of OISE. “On behalf of the OISE community, I wholeheartedly congratulate Professor Lee for this significant recognition from SSHRC.”

With the Impact Award, Lee is being primarily recognized for his trailblazing, three-decade-long research focus on child moral development – specifically, how children learn to tell lies. His research has transformed our understanding of the development of lying.

His discoveries have had far-reaching applied implications and sustained impacts on real-world practices. For example, his work led to Canadian law reforms in 2005 concerning obtaining evidence from children. Since 2006, a legal procedure based on his research must be employed to admit children as witnesses in Canadian criminal courts.

Lee is also known for for his invention of transdermal optical imaging, a groundbreaking technology that measures physiological changes to the human body — like heart rate and blood pressure — simply by looking at a person’s face. The invention has led to cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications including Anura and DeepAffex Cloud, which are now used to assess and manage physical and mental health through the use of smartphones. 

“I am deeply grateful for SSHRC’s strong commitment to supporting social science research like that of mine. Because of this commitment, our lab was able to make practical contributions far beyond those we could have ever foreseen. These include impacts on legal reforms concerning child witnesses in Canada, advancements in the diagnosis and treatment of children with conduct problems, and the invention of a new imaging technology to monitor and study people’s physical and mental health using smartphones,” says Lee.

Lee thanks the more than 10,000 children who participated in his studies on the development of deception and have since grown into successful adults—professors, lawyers, and thriving students. “Rest assured, their childhood tales have not led them astray,” he says.

The recipient is awarded a $50,000 prize, which must be used within one year to further develop the research being recognized. A minimum of 10 per cent of the award funds must be used to promote the recipient’s research achievements.

In addition to being named a 2022 finalist in this award category, Lee was named a recipient of the University of Toronto President’s Impact Award in 2022.