Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an associate professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School and the department of Data Science of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.^[3][4][5] He was previously a research scientist working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with David Reich and David Altshuler.^[6] Li's work has made several important contributions in the field of next generation sequencing.

Education

Li majored in physics at Nanjing University from 1997 to 2001.^[7] He received his PhD from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. His thesis, titled "Constructing the TreeFam database", was supervised by Wei-Mou Zheng.^[2]

Research

Li was involved in a number of projects while working at the Beijing Genomics Institute from 2002 to 2006. These included studying rice finishing,^[8] silkworm sequencing,^[9] and genetic variation in chickens.^[10]

From 2006 to 2009, Li worked on a postdoctoral research fellowship with Richard M. Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.^[11] During this time, Li made several important contributions to the field of next generation sequencing (NGS) through the development of software such as the SAMtools NGS utilities,^[12] the Burrows–Wheeler aligner (BWA),^[13] MAQ,^[14] TreeSoft and TreeFam.^[15]

Li joined the Broad Institute in 2009, working in the core faculty lab of David Altshuler,^[11][16] which investigates the discovery and understanding of the genetic causes of disease.

As of December 2018, Li's papers on SAMtools^[12] and BWA^[13] (sequence alignment using the Burrows–Wheeler transform) have both been cited over 16,000 times.^[17]

Awards

In 2012, Li won the Benjamin Franklin award^[1] in bioinformatics. Li became the fourth former member of Richard Durbin's lab to win the award, following Sean Eddy, Ewan Birney and Alex Bateman.^[18]

Personal

Li lives in Boston with his wife and daughter.^[6]