About me

My name is Heng Li, an associate professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I study advanced computational methods and mathematical models to help researchers to understand biology better. I have worked on genomics, population genetics, phylogenetics and network dynamics. I led the design of the SAM format, created SAMtools/htslib and developed BWA and minimap2 among others. I also routinely collaborate with other biologists and computer scientists, and have been involved in multiple international projects such as the 1000 Genomes Project and the Human Pangenome Reference project.

I graduated from Nanjing University in China with a B.Sc. in physics. Under the supervision of Wei-Mou Zheng, I obtained my Ph.D. in theoretical biophysics in 2006 from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, while working at BGI in the same period. I was a postdoc of Richard Durbin before I became a research scientist at the Broad Institute in 2009.

At the time I am writing this page, my wife, my daughter and I are living around Boston, United States. Our motherland is China, forever.

Selected Publications