Pete Lee obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Manchester University in 1976. In 1975 he joined the research staff in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, working on fault tolerance. With Tom Anderson, he co-authored one of the first text books on Fault Tolerance. In 1981 he joined the Corporate Research Group of Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts, USA. After 3 years he moved to a start-up company, Encore Computer Corporation. In 1986 he returned to Newcastle as a Professor of Computing Science, and started the Parallel Processing Research Group. That group concentrated on shared-memory multiprocessors, and exploiting the parallelism that such architectures offered. Subsequently the research group was renamed the Data-Intensive Systems Research Group, to reflect its wider research agenda, which included the development of Bioinformatics as a research theme within the School of Computing Science. The research group was renamed again in 2007 as the Scalable Information Management group (now under the direction of Prof Watson) with its increased concentration on e-Science.

Since 2006 Pete Lee has been Head of the School of Computing Science.