Lingjun Li

Meet Lingjun Li

Main research aims? My research program is centered around the development of novel mass spectrometry-based technologies and enabling tools to study challenging and significant neuroscience and biomedical problems that are relevant to human health.

Making personalized medicine a reality… I believe that with the rapid development of more sensitive and high-resolution and precision measurement tools, analytical science can make personalized medicine a reality. The continued development of advanced analytical tools, especially mass spectrometry-based omics approaches, enables high-throughput quantitative measurement of biomolecular features such as proteins, posttranslational modification isoforms, lipids and metabolites and their structural isomers in healthy and diseased conditions.  These systems level omics technologies have revolutionized medical research by enabling large-scale studies and revealing individual differences, thus leading to more precise clinical diagnosis and personalized medicine and individualized treatment.

Biggest challenge facing the field right now? With the advancements in analytical tools, large-scale and large-size datasets have been generated at an unprecedented rate. The need for effective computational tools to handle and process these large datasets, integrate data from multiple domains and molecular layers to extract meaningful biological information and conclusions that can guide clinical diagnosis and treatment represent one of the biggest challenges facing the field. Along the same line, translating candidate biomarkers from the lab into clinical applications presents a major challenge facing the field, and is very costly. Lowering the cost of MS instrumentation without sacrificing performance would be key to make these technological advancements more accessible to the broader community and increase its society impact.