Heng Li

Bioinformatician

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.github.io

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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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

## References[edit]

1. ^ a b "Broad's Heng Li Wins 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award - Bio-IT World". Archived from the original on 2012-04-01.
2. ^ a b Li, Heng (2006). Constructing the TreeFam database (PDF) (PhD thesis). Chinese Academy of Sciences.
3. ^ "Heng Li | Department of Biomedical Informatics". dbmi.hms.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-30.
4. ^ "Noted computational biologist Heng Li joins faculty". harvard.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-30.
5. ^ "HLi Lab - Home". hlilab.github.io. Retrieved 2018-10-30.
6. ^ a b "Heng Li's Homepage". sourceforge.net. Archived from the original on 2012-04-19.
7. ^ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lh3lh3 [self-published source]
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. PMC 546038. 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. Bibcode:2004Sci...306.1937X. doi:10.1126/science.1102210. PMID 15591204. S2CID 7227719.
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. Bibcode:2004Natur.432..717B. doi:10.1038/nature03156. PMC 2263125. PMID 15592405.
11. ^ a b "ResearcherID: Heng Li". researcherid.com. Retrieved 11 September 2014.
12. ^ a b Li, H.; Handsaker, B.; Wysoker, A.; Fennell, T.; Ruan, J.; Homer, N.; Marth, G.; Abecasis, G.; Durbin, R.; 1000 Genome Project Data Processing Subgroup (2009). "The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools". Bioinformatics. 25 (16): 2078–2079. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp352. PMC 2723002. PMID 19505943.`{{cite journal}}`: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
13. ^ a b 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. PMC 2705234. 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. PMC 2577856. PMID 18714091.
15. ^ Li, H.; Coghlan, A.; Ruan, J.; Coin, L. J.; Hériché, J. K.; Osmotherly, L.; Li, R.; Liu, T.; Zhang, Z.; Bolund, L.; Wong, G. K.; Zheng, W.; Dehal, P.; Wang, J.; Durbin, R. (2006). "TreeFam: A curated database of phylogenetic trees of animal gene families". Nucleic Acids Research. 34 (90001): D572–D580. doi:10.1093/nar/gkj118. PMC 1347480. PMID 16381935.
16. ^ "Current Lab Members - Altshuler Lab". broadinstitute.org. 2010-05-25. Retrieved 11 September 2014.
17. ^ "Heng Li - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.co.uk. Retrieved 16 April 2015.
18. ^ "Heng Li Credits Durbin Pedigree in Accepting Franklin Award". bio-itworld.com. Retrieved 11 September 2014.

Authority control databases: Academics |

* DBLP
* ORCID
* Publons
* ResearcherID
* Scopus

|