Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her specific appointments are in the Department of Statistics (primary) and the Departments of Biostatistics, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics (secondary) at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also a faculty member in the Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program in Bioinformatics.
Before joining UCLA in 2013, Jessica obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Interdepartmental Group in Biostatistics at University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Profs. Peter J. Bickel and Haiyan Huang. Jessica received her B.S. (summa cum laude) from the Department of Biological Sciences and Technology at Tsinghua University, China, in 2007. Jessica and her students focus on developing statistical and computational methods motivated by important questions in biomedical sciences and abundant information in big genomics and health-related data. On the statistical methodology side, her research interests include association measures, asymmetric classification, multiple testing, and high-dimensional variable selection. On the biomedical application side, her research interests include bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing, comparative genomics, and information flow in the central dogma. To bridge statistics and biology, Jessica is interested in enhancing the rigor in genomics data analysis.
Jessica is the recipient of the Hellman Fellowship (2015), the PhRMA Foundation Research Starter Grant in Informatics (2017), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), the Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Math Scholar Award (2018), the NSF CAREER Award (2019), the UCLA DGSOM Keck W. M. Keck Foundation Junior Faculty Award (2020), the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 China (2020), the Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship (2022), and the COPSS Emerging Leader Award (2023).