Dr. Li is a Professor at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Division of Hematology and Oncology. His long-term research goal is to fully understand the molecular basis of leukemogenesis and the biology of leukemia stem cells (LSCs) for developing more effective leukemia therapies.

Dr. Li’s research career in studying blood cancers began in 1996 when he started to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. Since becoming an independent investigator in 2001, he has had some seminal contributions to our understanding of BCR-ABL and JAK2V617F leukemogenesis (both diseases are associated with the disturbed function of normal hematopoietic stem cells), as shown by publishing his work in high-impact journals (for example, Hu et al. Nature Genetics 36(5):453-461, 2004; Hu et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103(45):16870-16875, 2006; Chen et al. Nature Genetics 41:783-792, 2009; Zhang et al. Nature Genetics 44:861-871, 2012; Chen et al. J Clin Invest 124(9):3847-3862, 2014; Chen et al. Cancer Research 1;77(1):164-174, 2017; Wang et al. Cell Stem Cell 27: 1-17, 2020). In recent years, expanded his research interest into “Artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine” (Li et al. Nature Communications. 11(1):6004, 2020; Li et al. iScience 25, 104031, April 15, 2022).