He Li, Ph.D.

Dr. He Li (Hurley) earned his Ph.D. in Pathology from the University of Oklahoma Healthy Sciences Center in 2015. Under the mentorship of Dr. Kathy Sivils and Dr. Chris Lessard, his dissertation mainly focused on the genetics of human autoimmune diseases, especially Sjögren’s syndrome and systemic lupus erythematous. His dissertation involved genome-wide association study and utilization of next-generation sequencing to identify genetic variants associated with autoimmune diseases. Hurley joined Dr. Frazer’s lab in May 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher. He is interested in applying next-generation sequencing technologies in functional genomics to identify functional variants that influence cardiovascular disease susceptibility. Currently, his project is focused on identifying genome-wide chromatin interactions using Hi-C experiments and incorporating the results with whole-genome sequencing to determine the impact of disease-associated variants on chromatin structure. He is also interested in determining how chromatin structure changes might influence transcriptome profiles in cardiomyocytes derived from iPSCs.