Biography:Heng Li

From HandWiki
Heng Li
Known forBioinformatics
Burrows–Wheeler transform
Samtools
TreeFam
AwardsBenjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) (2012) [1]
Scientific career
InstitutionsWellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Broad Institute
Beijing Genomics Institute
ThesisConstructing the TreeFam database (2006)
Doctoral advisorWei-Mou Zheng[2]
Websitelh3lh3.users.sourceforge.net

Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an assistant professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School and the department of Biostatistics & Computational Biology 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 during 1997–2001.[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]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Broad's Heng Li Wins 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award - Bio-IT World". Archived from the original on 2012-03-14. https://www.webcitation.org/669ldp6A3?url=http://www.bio-itworld.com/2012/03/14/broads-heng-li-wins-2012-benjamin-franklin-award.html. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Li, Heng (2006). Constructing the TreeFam database (PDF) (PhD thesis). Chinese Academy of Sciences.
  3. "Heng Li | Department of Biomedical Informatics" (in en). http://dbmi.hms.harvard.edu/person/faculty/heng-li. 
  4. Erica. "Noted computational biologist Heng Li joins faculty" (in en-gb). http://bcb.dfci.harvard.edu/index.php/posts/126-hengli18. 
  5. "HLi Lab - Home". https://hlilab.github.io. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 "Heng Li's Homepage". Archived from the original on 2012-03-14. https://www.webcitation.org/669kwoF9C?url=http://lh3lh3.users.sourceforge.net/. 
  7. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lh3lh3
  8. Yu, Jun et al. (2005). "The Genomes of Oryza sativa: A History of Duplications". PLoS Biology 3 (2): e38. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030038. PMID 15685292. 
  9. Xia, Q et al. (Dec 10, 2004). "A draft sequence for the genome of the domesticated silkworm (Bombyx mori).". Science 306 (5703): 1937–40. doi:10.1126/science.1102210. PMID 15591204. 
  10. Ka-Shu Wong, Gane et al. (9 December 2004). "A genetic variation map for chicken with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms". Nature 432 (7018): 717–722. doi:10.1038/nature03156. PMID 15592405. 
  11. 11.0 11.1 "ResearcherID: Heng Li". http://www.researcherid.com/rid/D-9344-2011. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
  12. 12.0 12.1 Li, H.; Handsaker, B.; Wysoker, A.; Fennell, T.; Ruan, J.; Homer, N.; Marth, G.; Abecasis, G. et al. (2009). "The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools". Bioinformatics 25 (16): 2078–2079. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp352. PMID 19505943. 
  13. 13.0 13.1 Li, H.; Durbin, R. (2009). "Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler transform". Bioinformatics 25 (14): 1754–1760. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp324. PMID 19451168. 
  14. Li, H.; Ruan, J.; Durbin, R. (2008). "Mapping short DNA sequencing reads and calling variants using mapping quality scores". Genome Research 18 (11): 1851–1858. doi:10.1101/gr.078212.108. PMID 18714091. 
  15. Li, H.; Coghlan, A.; Ruan, J.; Coin, L. J.; Hériché, J. K.; Osmotherly, L.; Li, R.; Liu, T. et al. (2006). "TreeFam: A curated database of phylogenetic trees of animal gene families". Nucleic Acids Research 34 (90001): D572–D580. doi:10.1093/nar/gkj118. PMID 16381935. 
  16. "Current Lab Members - Altshuler Lab". 2010-05-25. https://www.broadinstitute.org/scientific-community/science/core-faculty-labs/altshuler-lab/current-lab-members. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
  17. "Heng Li - Google Scholar Citations". https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=HQv0p0kAAAAJ&hl=en. Retrieved 16 April 2015. 
  18. "Heng Li Credits Durbin Pedigree in Accepting Franklin Award". http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/04/26/12/Heng-Li-credits-Durbin-pedigree-Franklin-Award.html. Retrieved 11 September 2014.