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institutions, such as MIT, Harvard Medical School, University of California Riverside, Vanderbilt University, Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Lethbridge in Canada. “If you have a good team you can achieve a lot of things that one person alone cannot,” he says. And when he’s not in the lab, Li is in the classroom, following URI’s “Think Big, We Do” motto by training his students to become problem solvers. He tells his students to find a problem in today’s health and medical field and create their own solutions, encouraging the future scientists to think outside the box.

Assistant Professor Deyu Li and his research team of URI graduate and undergraduate students.

“I encourage my students think about how to contribute their knowledge to better our society,” he says. “Teaching does not only provide students with knowledge, but also assists them to think creatively and to take action. That’s really important.” The overall goal of Li’s lab is to understand the mechanisms of disease and developing better therapies. “We’re trying to help people in different ways, either through prevention, by creating better therapies, or by withholding use of potent and dangerous drugs when they are destined not to work for patients with resistance to those medicines,” Li says. Ultimately, Li looks to the future with a desire to help people, encouraging people to use early detection to enable positive health changes and prevention of disease.

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Li’s solution, therefore, is to look at the bigger picture by sequencing a person’s genome, rather than focusing on a single point mutation, and to then observe patterns that indicate a high risk of developing cancer.

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