Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA	Ph.D.		Biochemistry
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA	Research fellow		Translational lung cancer

Chendi Li, PhD, was born and raised in Xi’an, China. She completed her PhD in the Department of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. During her PhD work at BU with Dr. Stephen Farmer, she identified a novel MRTFA signaling pathway that dictates multipotential progenitor cell fate towards smooth muscle v.s. beige adipocyte (McDonald*, Li* et al., Cell, 2015). Her postdoctoral research, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Aaron Hata, MD, PhD at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, explored therapy-induced resistance in KRAS non-small cell lung cancer. She had identified STK11 loss as a genomic biomarker that renders vulnerability to the combination of KRAS G12C + MCL-1 inhibitor (Li et al., BioRxiv, 2022), as well as the first documented instance of clinical acquired resistance to the KRAS G12C inhibitor (Tanaka*, Lin* and Li* et al., Cancer Discovery, 2021). She is currently an instructor in medicine and investigation, exploring evolutionary trajectories of drug-tolerant persisters by combining DNA/RNA barcoding and single-cell sequencing with mathematical modeling. She is also working on dissecting DNA repair mechanisms, genomic instability, and resistance to targeted therapies.