C. C. Li

Ching Chun Li (; October 27, 1912 – October 20, 2003) was a Chinese-American population geneticist and human geneticist.

Li became persona non grata for studying and teaching genetics following the 1949 establishment of a communist government in mainland China. The new government took the diplomatic policy of "Leaning to One Side" and adopted Soviet thought and action, including the genetic thought of the Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko, who was standing against Mendelian inheritance. In 1949, Li was appointed as a professor at Beijing Agricultural University (now China Agricultural University), which had been recently founded through the merger of the Colleges of Agriculture at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and North China University (now the Renmin University of China). Li was persecuted by the party branch secretary of Beijing Agricultural University, Le Tianyu, because of Li's defense of genetics. Li joined the newly founded School of Public Health (GSPH) at the University of Pittsburgh in 1951. He became Professor of Biometry in 1960 and later chaired the School of Public Health's Department of Biostatistics from 1969 to 1975. He also served as the president of the American Society of Human Genetics in 1960. Despite officially retiring in 1982, he continued to publish another 25 academic papers and go to work at his office every day until a few months before his death in 2003.