Biography:

Dr. Li was born at Ruili, a small beautiful town on the border between China and Burma, and grew up at Tonghai, a town near Kunming. After finishing his high school there, he went to the Shangdong University and got his BS degree. Then jointly supervised by Prof. Ya-Ping Zhang (Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Prof. Yun-Xin Fu (University of Texas at Houston), he got my PhD degree in Zoology/Genetics in 2002. His major work during this period is related to population genetics, and they have found that the endangerment of the most of species may not be due to reduced genetic diversity. Then he went to the University of Munich and worked with Prof. Wolfgang Stephan. They provide evidence for the recent action of positive selection in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. After another one-year stay at the University of Cologne with Prof. Thomas Wiehe, he went to Shanghai and set up the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genomics at the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in September, 2007. The long-standing interest of his group is to study the molecular mechanism of evolution and speciation. Currently, they are focusing on developing reliable methods to detect recent positive Darwinian selection and artificial selection. By applying these methods to the study of adaptive evolution of human, Drosophila, HIV and several domesticated species, they are expecting to reveal the molecular mechanism of adaptation as well as functional genes underlying economic traits.

Abstract: