About Me
Michelle M. Li
Biomedical Machine Learning Scientist
I am a PhD candidate in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Albert J. Ryan Fellow, and Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award recipient. I received my B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford University, where I developed computational methods to study the mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance and susceptibility with Dr. Ami Bhatt and Dr. Samuel Yang. At Harvard, I continue designing novel machine learning methods to expedite diagnostic and therapeutic endeavors with Dr. Marinka Zitnik and close academic and industry collaborators (including Dr. Isaac Kohane, Dr. Tianxi Cai, and Roche). The overarching objective of my PhD research is to generate contextual AI (via graph machine learning) to diagnose and treat patients for whom conventional medicine fails. Concretely, my work aims to tackle the challenges of diagnosing patients with rare, or even novel, diseases, identifying patients-like-me using inter-hospital EHR and genomic data, discovering novel biomarkers across cell types for therapeutic design, and predicting cancer patients’ likelihood of responding to immune checkpoint blockade therapies. Beyond academia, I have worked at Genentech and Microsoft Research.
STEM Educator & Advocate
Inspired by my mentors and teachers from educational non-profit organizations, namely the TEAK Fellowship and S-PREP at Columbia University, I dedicate much of my time to mentoring and teaching students who are first-generation low-income (FLI) and/or under-represented minorities (URM) in STEM. I am an academic advisor for first-year students at Harvard College (Board of First-Year Advisors), a mentor for Harvard College’s Women in STEM Mentorship Program and Harvard-AEMES Mentorship Program (Smith College), and a co-founder, director, and mentor for the Young Women in STEM: Mentoring Program in India (hosted by Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering). Beyond Harvard, I am the founder and director of Reroot STEM, a nonprofit organization committed to empowering historically URM around the world to pursue a career in STEM; I founded and teach the middle school computer science program at Alexander Twilight Academy (ATA), a tuition-free academic catalyst for talented Boston-area students from under-resourced backgrounds; and I served as a founding board member of SRMPmachine at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to create curricula that can best engage high school students in machine learning research.