Lee Weigt is the Director of the Laboratories of Analytical Biology (LAB) at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The LAB is the hub of the molecular biotechnology infrastructure at NMNH and as some of its components, houses the SI’s DNA Barcoding Initiative, the Instrumentation Core, and remote management and assistance to other satellite molecular facilities and projects at the SI. Lee was trained as a herpetologist specializing in rates of molecular evolution, speciation and population genetics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He then went to Panama in 1988 to build a molecular laboratory at STRI and ended up staying there until 1996. After stints running the labs at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (at Virginia Tech), he returned to the Smithsonian in 2001 to revamp the NMNH labs, and took over the directorship of those labs in 2003.