Wen-Hsiung Li

Wen-Hsiung Li (; born September 22, 1942) is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Biography

Li was born in Taiwan in 1942. In 1968, he received a M.S. in geophysics from National Central University. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. From 1972 to 1973, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison (genetics), working with James F. Crow. In 1973, he moved to the University of Texas, where he was appointed as a professor in 1984. Since 1998, he has been a professor at the University of Chicago.

Scientific contributions Li is best known for his studies on the molecular clock (i.e. rates and patterns of DNA sequence evolution ) and on the patterns and consequences of gene duplication.

In 2003, he received the international Balzan Prize for his contribution to genetics and evolutionary biology, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, who cited his role in "establishing theoretical foundations for molecular phylogenetics and evolutionary genomics". He is the author of the first textbook in the field of molecular evolution, Molecular Evolution and Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution (co-authored with Dan Graur), and an author on more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Honors Academician, Academia Sinica Taiwan, 1998 Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999 President of the “Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution”, 2000 Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2003 Balzan Prize 2003 for genetics and evolution (The third recipient, following Sewall Wright (1984) and John Maynard Smith (1991)). Inaugural Chen Award for Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research, Human Genome Organisation, 2008 2019 SMBE Motoo Kimura Lifetime Contribution Award

Selected publications

Selected books