Dr. Bo Li

Dr. Bo Li is a Principal Scientist II at AI for Biology and Translation (AIBT), Genentech, Inc. His research focuses on three major topics: Science, Technology and Computational Methods. For Science, his team works on lung cancer and especially small cell lung cancer. For Technology, his team evaluates and adopts cutting-edge high-throughput data generation technologies, such as Cellanome and SBX sequencing. For Computational Methods, his team develops novel computational and deep learning tools for enabling insight discovery from high-throughput multi-modal data.

Before joining in Genentech, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital.

He received his Ph.D. in computer science from UW-Madison and completed two postdoctoral trainings with Dr. Lior Pachter at UC Berkeley and Dr. Aviv Regev at Broad Institute.

He is best known for developing RSEM, an impactful RNA-seq transcript quantification software. RSEM papers are cited 25,915 times (Google Scholar, Aug 2026) and adopted by several big consortia such as TCGA, ENCODE, GTEx and TOPMed.