Song Li has been named assistant professor of crop and soil environmental sciences in Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. 

Li is one of 19 new faculty members that were recently hired in the college. New positions were identified to bring new talent to its focus areas, including food and health, infectious disease, biodesign and processing, and agricultural profitability and environmental sustainability. The new faculty members are distributed across teaching, research, and Extension.

He received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics and genomics, integrative biosciences from Pennsylvania State University in State College in 2010, and bachelor's degree in biotechnology from Peking University in 2002.

Li's laboratory is trying to understand how to extract biological meaningful features and make predictions from “big data” — a topic that has become a major challenge for computational biology research. 

His research focus seeks to build a research team to develop computational tools for genome scale data analysis and integration. The team's goal will ultimately be to develop platforms that can serve as a source of discovery and to generate testable hypotheses for wet bench biologists, in addition to answering key biological questions using large-scale data.

During his academic career Li received the First Place Poster Award at Network Science Day and was invited to speak at the fifth annual RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics in 2012.

 

 

Written by Amy Loeffler.
Share this story