John A. N. Lee, a professor of computer science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, was born in Coventry, England. After earning his doctoral degree at the University of Nottingham, Lee worked as a civil engineer with Freeman, Fox & Partners, where he served on teams which designed the Medway Bridge near London, the Firth of Forth Road Bridge, and Australia's Sydney Opera House. In 1959, Lee joined the faculty of Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), where he initiated computer classes and a computer center. Lee moved in 1964 to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he established a computer science program and served as its first department head. During this time, he authored The Anatomy of a Compiler (1967) and Computer Semantics (1971). In 1973, the National Bureau of Standards contracted with Lee to form a "nucleus standard for the BASIC programming language."

Lee joined the faculty of Virginia Tech in 1974. Here, he assisted in the development of a graduate program and extended the undergraduate program. He served as chairman of the undergraduate program for many years and developed several new courses.

The recipient of several distinguished awards, Lee has made significant contributions to the development of computer language standards, the history of computing, and professional development. His interest in history led Lee to organize the 1982 25th anniversary commemoration of FORTRAN programming. Among his many other activities, he served as editor and editor-in-chief of the Annals of the History of Computing from 1987 to 1995.