Malaysian-born, Miss Lee (23) is a bachelor of dental surgery student who has lived in the United States before moving to New Zealand.
She won the Hatton competition from other regional award winners from throughout the world at the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) conference in California this month.
She had been "very excited" to win the award, which included a plaque and $US1600 prize, after making a presentation on her research.
She had undertaken a research project to investigate how drugs were pumped out of drug-resistant fungal cells in the human mouth, and had developed a way of measuring pump function.
This had enabled her to identify a pump inhibitor that could overcome fungal drug resistance.
This raises the eventual possibility of combining a pump-inhibiting substance with anti-fungal drugs to boost the effectiveness of such drugs, given the challenge of drug resistance.
The New Zealand branch of the IADR selected her research to compete in the Australasian and New Zealand IADR poster competition in Australia, last year.
After winning that competition, she won the overall international contest this month, against top dental students from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
This is the second time in the past four years the Hatton competition has been won by a New Zealand dental student, the other being Shilpa Raju in 2008.
Both students were supervised by Dr Ann Holmes in the molecular microbiology laboratory at the university's Sir John Walsh Research Institute, in the Faculty of Dentistry.
Miss Lee's research was supported by an Otago University Division of Health Sciences Summer Studentship, and funding from the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the former New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.
