Yan Li, PhD Spotlight
July 5, 2023
Dr. Yan Li, Ph.D. leads the Multimodal Metabolic Brain Imaging Lab at UCSF. She currently works on several research projects involving advanced imaging techniques for brain metabolism in patients with brain tumors, depression, and autism, with the goal of improving patient management.
Dr. Yan Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF. She received her medical degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and her Master of Science in Biochemistry from McGill University in Canada, where she completed a thesis on using nuclear magnetic resonance to examine protein structures. However, as she advanced in that area, she found herself more interested in the imaging area, “I like the technique, and I wanted to do more.”
Dr. Li then came to the Bay Area for Ph.D. work in the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Program in Bioengineering, where longtime faculty member Sarah Nelson was her mentor and colleague from 2004 until 2019. Dr. Li often reflects on how much she gained from that relationship. “Dr. Nelson was my role model. I have learned a lot from her, such as how to write research proposals, how to manage projects, and how to establish a research program. I also learned much from her on how to balance family and research. We worked together until she passed. I miss her a lot.”
Dr. Nelson’s example showed Dr. Li how to balance the draw of constant research and the nature of life outside the lab. “The biggest decision that I made in my career is because of my family. I initially planned to be a physician. I passed all the board exams but eventually changed my mind and went in a completely different direction. Becoming a faculty member here at UCSF allowed me to find a good balance between the necessities of work and my family at that time.” When Dr. Li is not working with her lab team, she is raising her kids as well as volunteering for school PTAs, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, and coaching teams for the Lego League competition.
Dr. Li’s metabolic imaging research targeting different types of diseases involves collaborators from other UCSF departments. For example, “We have a good and very long relationship with colleagues in the neurosurgical department.” She credits the university’s academic and research culture with a great degree of the success she has gained. “I have experienced a very welcoming and productive environment here at UCSF.”
Metabolic imaging is particularly useful in glioma, as the tumors process energy in different pathways and rates. The structural MR images most often obtained for clinical diagnosis do not always clearly define tumor boundaries. Dr. Li’s Multimodal Metabolic Brain Imaging Lab focuses on the development and implementation of new methods for imaging steady-state and dynamic whole-brain metabolites. The workflow her team has created to extract this information quickly has the potential to be of great use to the broader neuro-oncology community if integrated into the standard clinical workflow. “We are now working on clinical translation to determine whether we can use these novel methods and tools to benefit patients. We also anticipate starting a new project in the fall of 2023, in which we will investigate AI-based methods to speed up processing and make data acquisition more accurate for MR metabolic imaging on the clinical scanners. We want it to be as simple as the clinician pressing a button.”
Dr. Li’s research has shown promise in further understanding forms of psychiatric diseases, focusing on measuring neurotransmitters for disease onset and progression using MR metabolic imaging. One novel project is to monitor mitochondrial metabolism in major depressive disorder using non-radioactive deuterium glucose. Researchers can map brain metabolism by having the patient drink water filled with harmless sugars, which can be converted to different metabolites and measured once they reach the brain. Dr. Li also works on investigating the speech deficits that are prevalent in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. The imaging technique can identify concentrations of neurotransmitters in different areas of the brain and perhaps find imbalances that cause symptoms. Precisely locating such imbalances could provide the potential for developing drugs and treatments.
Dr. Li is dedicated to her research and is always looking forward to the new direction to benefit patients with great enthusiasm. She lights up when she mentions a study recommended for an upcoming Department of Defense grant, clearly eager to leap into the next exciting and challenging chapter of neuroimaging science she will have the opportunity to unravel.