Heng Li

Education Li majored in physics at Nanjing University from 1997 to 2001. 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.

Research Li was involved in a number of projects while working at the Beijing Genomics Institute from 2002 to 2006. These included studying rice finishing, silkworm sequencing, and genetic variation in chickens.

From 2006 to 2009, Li worked on a postdoctoral research fellowship with Richard M. Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. 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, the Burrows–Wheeler aligner (BWA), MAQ, TreeSoft and TreeFam.

Li joined the Broad Institute in 2009, working in the core faculty lab of David Altshuler, which investigates the discovery and understanding of the genetic causes of disease.

As of October 2025, Li's papers on SAMtools

Awards In 2012, Li won the Benjamin Franklin award 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. Li has been an ISCB Fellow since 2023.

Personal Li lives in Boston with his wife, daughter, and two cats.