Heng Li

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Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in the department of Biomedical Informatics and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the department of Data Science. He previously did research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with David Reich and David Altshuler.

Li studied physics at Nanjing University from 1997 to 2001. He earned a PhD in theoretical physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006, with a thesis titled “Constructing the TreeFam database” supervised by Wei-Mou Zheng. He worked at the Beijing Genomics Institute from 2002 to 2006 on projects including rice finishing, silkworm sequencing, and genetic variation in chickens. He then did postdoctoral work at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (2006–2009) with Richard Durbin, where he helped develop software for next-generation sequencing, such as SAMtools, BWA, MAQ, TreeSoft and TreeFam.

In 2009 he joined the Broad Institute in the lab of David Altshuler. His work on next-generation sequencing has had a big impact in genetics. His papers on SAMtools and BWA have been cited more than 50,000 times as of October 2025. He won the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics in 2012, and he is the fourth former member of Durbin’s lab to win. He became an ISCB Fellow in 2023. He lives in Boston with his wife, daughter, and two cats.