Dr Lee J. Yao is currently tenured full Professor and is the Rev. J.A. Butt Distinguished Professor in Accounting. He also holds the prestigious Marquette Faculty Fellowship at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is a CPA, an Australian and English Chartered Accountant, an Australian Certified Management Accountant, a Certified Fraud Examiner and a British Chartered IT Professional. He has extensive senior management experience with multinational organizations, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Arthur Andersen & Co. in accounting and information systems in Australia, USA, UK, and Singapore for more than 20 years before joining the academia. He was a Partner at Arthur Andersen & Co responsible for its litigation supports/forensic area in the 90s. For the last ten years since he joined the academe, he first worked as an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Then he was Associate Dean (Research) for the School of Business and Technology at La Trobe University in Australia. Before joining Loyola University New Orleans, he was Associate Professor at Monash University in Australia. According to the U.S. News World University Rankings, Monash University ranks in the top 50 among the world's best doctoral granting universities, Nanyang Technological University ranks 73rd in the same category, while Loyola University New Orleans ranks in the top 10 on the U.S. South comprehensive university category.

He has published widely on issues in accounting and information systems, resulting in three books, more than three dozen articles in major referred journals, more than 80 papers presented at major referred international conferences and about 100 other non-refereed publications, all within ten years since he started his academic career. His published articles appear in such journals as Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance (JAAF), Journal of Business Research (JBR), Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR), Accounting and Finance (A&F), Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting (RQFA), International Journal of Accounting Information Systems (IJAIS), International Review of Economics and Finance (IREF), Advances in Behavioral Accounting Research (ABAR), Advances of Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting (AQAFA), Journal of Forensic Accounting (JFA), International Journal of Accounting and Information Management (IJAIM), Journal of Computer Information Systems (JCIS) and Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) among others. He regularly presented papers in major conferences including AAA Annual Meetings, DSI Annual Conferences and AFAANZ conferences etc. He was the recipient of an Innovative Teaching (Teaching Excellence) Award from La Trobe University in 2004. He was the recipient of the 2008 Best Reviewer Award from the Emerald Literati Network, UK. He has been elected to the Vice President (South-West Region) of the Accounting Program Leadership Group (APLG), AFRS and Fraud committee member in the Forensic and Investigative Section within the American Accounting Association. He has been appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious International Journal of Accounting and Information Management published by Emerald since 2007. He has been appointed Accounting Area Editor for the Journal of Asia Business Studies published by the University of San Francisco and Emerald since 2009. In 2011, he will serve as Guest Editor of a Special Issue of Electronic Markets.