Michelle M. Li, PhD

Assistant Professor (Incoming Fall 2026)

Department of Biomedical Engineering

College of Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

michellemli@cmu.edu

The MEDLI (pronounced as “medley”) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University innovates medical AI algorithms that generate personalized outputs based on the contexts in which they operate, dynamically adapting their reasoning to new cell types and tissues, medical specialties, patient populations, experimental and clinical workflows, and clinical roles. Their design is grounded in biological and medical principles to minimize the risk of contextual error, where predictions appear reasonable but fail to account for critical context-specific information. By developing frontier medical AI and collaborating with experimental and clinical researchers, we build models that seamlessly integrate across experimental and clinical workflows with minimal contextual error, from modulating cellular trajectories to diagnosing rare and complex diseases to inferring treatment response. Ultimately, we aim to innovate context-aware medical AI that treats patients for whom conventional medicine fails.