Li Lanjuan

Li Lanjuan (; born 13 September 1947), also romanized as Lan-Juan Li, is a Chinese epidemiologist and hepatologist. She is a professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and serves as the director of the State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases. She developed Li-NBAL, an artificial liver support system that is used to sustain the lives of people suffering from acute liver failure, and won multiple national awards for her roles in combatting the SARS, H1N1, and H7N9 epidemics.

Early life and education Li was born on 13 September 1947

After graduation, she became a middle school substitute teacher in her township. She also studied acupuncture at Zhejiang Chinese Medicine Hospital and performed acupuncture for local elders. Her village later recommended her to become a barefoot doctor, and she accepted the offer despite it paying much less than her teaching job. The system, now known as Li-NBAL, Instead of patenting the invention, she disseminated the technology to more than 300 hospitals all over China free of charge.

SARS

During the 2003 SARS outbreak, Li led the disease prevention effort in Zhejiang and controlled the disease's spread in the province. During the 2013 avian flu outbreak in the Yangtze Delta, Li's team isolated the H7N9 strain as the pathogen and proved the strain originated from live poultry markets. Her research prompted the government to close all live poultry markets, preventing the spread of the disease to the rest of China. On 20 April 2020, Stephen Chen from the South China Morning Post reported on research by Li and her team at Zhejiang University, identifying over 30 strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and that some of more aggressive strains generated 270 times as much viral load as the mildest versions. They discovered that the aggressive strains were linked to outbreaks in Europe and in the state of New York, whereas the less aggressive strains were found in the states of Washington and California.

Honours and awards 1998 State Science and Technology Progress Award (Second Class), for research on artificial liver support system 2005 elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) 2021 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering 2022 UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences

Personal life Li is married to Zheng Shusen, a liver transplant expert and also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. They have a son named Zheng Jie .