Dr Richard Lee

IALS colleagues will be saddened to hear of the death of Dr Richard (‘Dick’) Lee at his home in Buffalo, western New York state, on 7 May. He was 75.

Dick, who had been based at the University of Buffalo, had a particularly wide range of interests.  These extended from a close personal concern with the care of individuals to much broader questions of public health.  His enquiries led him to cross both disciplinary and international boundaries, from medicine to anthropology, and from the US to China, Thailand and India. A small part of all this is reflected in Dick’s obituary on his university website

From the 1990s onwards, Dick led a series of research projects in Ladakh and, together with his students, reported on these at the IALS conferences in Oxford (2001) and Rome (2007) as well as in the pages of Ladakh Studies. Always collaborative in his approach, he emphasised the need to include social and environmental factors in the study of medicine, and this in turn pointed to the need for close cooperation between researchers of different disciplines. Dick brought a distinctive set of insights with which to challenge our views of Ladakh and the world. He will be missed.