Profile
“When I was in high school, I found life sciences fascinating in that there were so many unsolved fundamental questions. I believed that most of these questions couldn’t be answered properly without powerful quantitative tools.”
Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li joined UCLA to focus her research on developing statistical and computational methods motivated by important questions in biomedical sciences and abundant information in big genomic and health-related data. Her research represents the intersection between statistical methodology and biomedical application. On the statistical methodology side, her research interests include association measures, high-dimensional variable selection, and asymmetric classification. Her biomedical application research includes next-generation bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing, comparative genomics, and the information flow of genetic information in cells from the DNA to messenger RNA to protein. In addition to her faculty appointments, Dr. Liis a member of the UCLA Bioinformatics Interdepartmental PhD Program and the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Gene Regulation Program. She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Li is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hellman Fellowship, the PhRMA Foundation Research Starter Grant in Informatics, the Johnson & Johnson Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Manufacturing and Design (WiSTEM2D) Scholars Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.