Dr. Li is an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles. She received her B.S. and M.S. in biochemistry from Peking University, M.S. in nutrition from University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from University of California, Los Angeles. Her main research interest is to understand the human microbiome in health and disease at both molecular and systems levels. Each individual carries many more bacterial cells than human cells. The microbes form an intricate symbiotic system with the host and play important roles in human nutrition, metabolism, and the development of immune system. Current focus of the Li lab is to understand the interactions between the microbes and the human host in relation to human health and diseases. Dr. Li’s group applies 16S rRNA sequence analysis, metagenomic shotgun sequence analysis, and metatranscriptomic analysis using Next Generation high-throughput sequencing technologies to extract genomic and transcriptional information of both the microbes and the human host. Molecular biology, metagenomics, and bioinformatics are the three main areas of the research. Dr. Li has been funded by multiple institutes at the NIH and other funding agencies to study the human microbiome, including one of the Demonstration Projects of the Human Microbiome Project. She has published multiple high-impact peer-reviewed papers in journals including Science Translational Medicine, The ISME Journal, Journal of Investigative Dermatology, mBio, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, mSphere.
