Cynthia Lee

Cynthia G. Lee is the Associate Director of Research for the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center, where she combines expertise in criminal justice and public defense with advanced quantitative and qualitative research methods to inform policy and improve justice system outcomes.

Lee is a nationally recognized expert on public defense workloads and weighted caseload studies. She was a co-author of the National Public Defense Workload Study and has led and contributed to major research initiatives involving court data, public defense, court fines and fees, civil procedure reforms, and problem-solving courts. Before joining the Deason Center, she served as a Principal Court Research Associate at the National Center for State Courts, where she directed large-scale court data collection projects and helped develop the National Open Court Data Standards (NODS). Her research has been widely published, including work on holistic defense and public defense workloads.

Lee holds a J.D. and an M.P.P. from William & Mary and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.