Li Li, PhD
Assistant Professor, RNA Therapeutics Institute, UMass Chan Medical School
Li.Li(at)umassmed.edu
Li Li grew up in Shanghai, China and received his B. Sc. degree in 2007 from Fudan University, conducting work in molecular dynamics simulations with Dr. Qiang Huang.
He received his Ph.D. in 2012, working with Professor Susan Martinis and Zaida Luthey-Schulten at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral work focused on aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRSs), a group of enzymes that establish the genetic code in all living organisms. He then moved to Professor Jack Szostak’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital for postdoctoral studies, where he developed an efficient chemical method to copy RNA sequences and explored the possibility of using in vitro selection to discover RNA sequences that can control translation in eukaryotic cells.
In 2020 Li started his independent group at the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. His goal is to make new discoveries of RNA biology by combining the power of evolution and chemistry with classical biochemical methods.