He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994. He is the author of over 70 publications, primarily in the area of intelligent tutoring systems and computational linguistics. He served as Program Chair for the 2004 International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems and for the ACM 2001 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Dr. Lester has been recognized with a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and 3 Best Paper Awards. His work in affective computing explores affect recognition and affect expression in intelligent tutoring systems.