The Li Lab, based at Weill Cornell Medicine and Houston Methodist Research Institute, focuses on integrating machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and large language models (LLMs) into biomedical research. Our mission is to leverage cutting-edge computational methods to tackle key challenges in drug repurposing and discovery, vaccine and RNA sequence design, and to develop data-driven models that uncover mechanisms of disease development and progression.

Our interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of computer science, systems biology, and translational medicine, with the goal of deepening our understanding of molecular biology and accelerate the translation of these insights into novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.

About Dr. Li

Dr. Shengyu Li is a leading expert in computational biology with over a decade of experience bridging computer science and life sciences. Her academic research has yielded several high-impact contributions in inferring cell state transition, revealing RNA turnover strategy, and elucidating mechanisms underlying cardiovascular diseases. Notably, She developed cellDancer (Nature Biotechnology), the first deep-learning framework to infer gene-specific RNA velocity at single-cell resolution, enabling precise modeling of cell-state transitions, and it is the only method that has quantitatively validated its consistency with experimentally measured data. Leveraging this framework, she further investigated the cell dynamics of smooth muscle cells in aortic aneurysms (Circulation). Moreover, she led computational work to demonstrate how depleting carnitine acetyltransferase (CRAT) in cardiomyocytes mechanistically contributes to heart failure, pinpointing CRAT as a potential therapeutic target (Nature Metabolism). In another work (Circulation Research), Dr. Li and her collaborators discovered a novel mechanism of engendering atherogenesis. She is commited to advance both computational methodology and translational disease research. In addition to her research achievements, Dr. Li actively contributes to the scientific community through peer review and academic service for leading journals and international conferences (e.g., Nature Communications, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and PLOS Computational Biology, etc.).