Dr Chen Li is a new Lab Head at the Monash BDI, where he joins the Cancer and Immunity Programs and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Supported by an ARC Future Fellowship and an NHMRC Ideas Grant, Dr Li’s lab develops cutting-edge computational and experimental multi-omic approaches—including transcriptomics, proteomics, and immunopeptidomics—to decode the complexities of human diseases and drive innovative therapeutic solutions.

Originally trained as a computer scientist, Dr. Li earned his PhD in 2016 under the supervision of A/Prof Ashley Buckle and Prof Jiangning Song at Monash University. His doctoral research focused on developing bioinformatics algorithms and databases to analyse the relationship between protein structure, function, and disease.

Following his PhD, Dr Li joined the laboratories of Prof Anthony Purcell and Prof Jian Li at Monash BDI as a research bioinformatician, expanding his expertise into proteomics and immunopeptidomics. In 2018, he was awarded the prestigious NHMRC CJ Martin Early Career Fellowship (2018–2022), which enabled him to train at ETH Zurich under renowned Swiss biologist Prof Ruedi Aebersold, a pioneer in proteomics and systems biology. There, he developed pipelines for profiling and predicting protein complexes, their perturbations, and functions using Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC)-Mass Spectrometry (MS) data. Dr Li returned to Monash BDI to continue his research in cancer immunotherapy, supported by a Cure Cancer Australia research grant (2023).

His lab at Monash BDI now leverages machine learning and bioinformatics to integrate and analyse multi-omic data in biomedical contexts, advancing and facilitating the development of novel immunotherapies.

Systems Proteomics; Immunopeptidomics; Cancer; Personalised Medicine; Bioinformatics