Biography
Dr Xiaohan Li graduated from Peking University, China, with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He obtained his PhD in biophysical chemistry with Prof. Elizabeth Rhoades from Yale University studying molecular function of intrinsically disordered tau protein implicated in multiple neurodegenerative diseases. He then moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology for post-doctoral research with Dr. Madan Babu and Dr. Liz Miller. Supported by a Marie-Curie fellowship, he identified a novel mechanism of tardigrade disordered protein HeLEA1 for membrane chaperoning in extreme stress tolerance, as well as how structural disorder contributes to intracellular membrane trafficking pathways. He is currently a post-doc with Prof. Liz Miller at the University of Dundee and has a broad interest in understanding how protein dynamics and sequence features of protein regions contribute to cellular function and dysfunction at the protein-membrane interface. His expertise is highly interdisciplinary, spanning chemistry, biophysics, cell biology, data science, and molecular evolution. He is very enthusiastic on bridging the gaps in communications between computational and experimental sciences, as well as promoting international scientific collaborations.