Heng Li is a

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

scientist. He is an associate professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is the third oldest medical school in the Un ...

and the department of Data Science of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was previously a research scientist working at the

Broad Institute The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institu ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

with David Reich and David Altshuler. Li's work has made several important contributions in the field of

next generation sequencing DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The ...

Education

Li majored in physics at Nanjing University from 1997 to 2001. He received his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; ) is the national academy for natural sciences and the highest consultancy for science and technology of the People's Republic of China. It is the world's largest research organization, with 106 research i ...

in 2006. His thesis, titled "Constructing the

TreeFam TreeFam (Tree families database) is a database of phylogenetic trees of animal genes. It aims at developing a curated resource that gives reliable information about ortholog and paralog assignments, and evolutionary history of various gene families ...

database", was supervised by Wei-Mou Zheng.

Research

Li was involved in a number of projects while working at the

Beijing Genomics Institute BGI Group, formerly Beijing Genomics Institute, is a Chinese genomics company with headquarters in Yantian, Shenzhen, Yantian, Shenzhen. The company was originally formed in 1999 as a genetics research center to participate in the Human Genome Pro ...

from 2002 to 2006. These included studying rice finishing,

silkworm ''Bombyx mori'', commonly known as the domestic silk moth, is a moth species belonging to the family Bombycidae. It is the closest relative of '' Bombyx mandarina'', the wild silk moth. Silkworms are the larvae of silk moths. The silkworm is of ...

sequencing, and genetic variation in chickens. From 2006 to 2009, Li worked on a

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

fellowship with Richard M. Durbin at the

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit organisation, non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is l ...

. During this time, Li made several important contributions to the field of

(NGS) through the development of software such as the

SAMtools SAMtools is a set of utilities for interacting with and post-processing short DNA sequence read alignments in the SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map), BAM (Binary Alignment/Map) and CRAM formats, written by Heng Li. These files are generated as output ...

NGS utilities, the Burrows–Wheeler aligner (BWA), MAQ, TreeSoft and TreeFam. Li joined the

in 2009, working in the core faculty lab of David Altshuler, which investigates the discovery and understanding of the genetic causes of disease. As of December 2018, Li's papers on

and BWA (sequence alignment using the

Burrows–Wheeler transform The Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) rearranges a character string into runs of similar characters, in a manner that can be reversed to recover the original string. Since compression techniques such as move-to-front transform and run-length enc ...

) have both been cited over 16,000 times.

Awards

In 2012, Li won the Benjamin Franklin award in

. Li became the fourth former member of Richard Durbin's lab to win the award, following

Sean Eddy Sean Roberts Eddy is a professor of molecular and cellular biology and of applied mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics ...

Ewan Birney John Frederick William Birney (known as Ewan Birney) (born 6 December 1972) is Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance ...

and Alex Bateman.

Personal

Li lives in

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

with his wife, daughter, and fish.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Li, Heng Living people Chinese bioinformaticians Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard Medical School faculty 21st-century Chinese scientists