The Lee Kong Chian Fellowship is the core of the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia, a joint effort established in 2007 by the National University of Singapore and Stanford University to raise the visibility, extent, and quality of scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia.

The infrastructure for research pursued through the fellowship is provided by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS and the Southeast Asia Program in the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford.