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Heng Li

bioinformatician

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ5714197
Source-derived summary

Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an associate professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School and the department of Data Science of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was previously a research scientist working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with David Reich and David Altshuler. Li's work has made several important contributions in the field of next generation sequencing.

Education

Li majored in physics at Nanjing University from 1997 to 2001. He received his PhD from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. His thesis, titled "Constructing the TreeFam database", was supervised by Wei-Mou Zheng.

Research

Li was involved in a number of projects while working at the Beijing Genomics Institute from 2002 to 2006. These included studying rice finishing, silkworm sequencing, and genetic variation in chickens.

From 2006 to 2009, Li worked on a postdoctoral research fellowship with Richard M. Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Heng Li” is bioinformatician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Heng and bioinformatician, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1997, 2001, 2006, 2002—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Heng and bioinformatician is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “bioinformatician” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5714197. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2002.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Heng Li”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Heng Li primary sources, Heng Li archive and Heng research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Heng Li”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Heng Li” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.