Rong Li BS, MS, PhD

Dr. Rong Li is a professor of cell biology and of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is also a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Her research uses microscopy to see how cells work. Dr. Li serves as the director of the Center for Cell Dynamics at the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences and is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. Dr. Li and her team are currently investigating how cells consolidate their damaged proteins and prevent them from spreading freely, in order to understand how to better treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS. Dr. Li received her B.S. and M.S. in biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. in genetics and cell biology from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed postdoctoral work in molecular cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Li joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2015.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Li was a principal investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri and held associate professor and assistant professor positions in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School.
She serves on the editorial board of Development, BCM-Cell Biology and Molecular Biology of the Cell. Her work has been recognized with awards from Wichita State University, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and Harvard Medical School.