Dr Yinghui Li is a Nanyang Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences (NTU) and a joint Principal Investigator in the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (A*STAR). She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences at the National University of Singapore and completed her doctoral research at Karolinska Institutet in 2013, in the laboratory of Professor Sven Pettersson, where she investigated the role of inflammation and host-gut microbiota interactions in intestinal tumorigenesis. She then conducted her postdoctoral training in Professor Vinay Tergaonkar’s laboratory at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), where she characterized the mechanisms of telomerase reactivation at mutant TERT promoters in human glioblastoma and melanoma. During her postdoctoral stint at IMCB, she discovered a novel mechanism of telomerase reactivation in cancers, which has huge clinical implications for cancer therapy and contributed to the institute’s efforts to develop new cancer-selective therapeutics. She was also awarded the Early Career Research grant by IMCB in 2014, to lead a team of international and local scientists in the research work which was published in Nature Cell Biology.
Dr Li is a recipient of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Graduate Scholarship (Overseas) and has co-authored 13 publications in journals such as Nature Cell Biology, Cell, Journal of Clinical Investigation and PNAS. During her postdoctoral career, she received the NMRC Young Individual Research Grant (YIRG) to pursue independent research in non-coding RNAs and cancer. She was awarded the National Research Foundation (NRF) fellowship in 2018 when she joined NTU.