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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.
Heng Li | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Bioinformatics Burrows–Wheeler transform Samtools TreeFam |
| Awards | Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) (2012) [1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Broad Institute Beijing Genomics Institute |
| Thesis | Constructing the TreeFam database (2006) |
| Doctoral advisor | Wei-Mou Zheng[2] |
| Website | hlilab |
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]
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]
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]
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