12/2025: Dr. Li received the 2024–25 UF College of Pharmacy Teaching & Service Award.
11/2025: Our paper "Apo2Mol: 3D Molecule Generation via Dynamic Pocket-Aware Diffusion Models" has been accepted by AAAI 2026. Congratulations, Xinzhe!
11/2025: Our paper "Extracellular vesicle–mediated gene editing for the treatment of nonsyndromic progressive hearing loss in adult mice" has been accepted by Science Translational Medicine.
10/2025: Our paper "DecoyDB: A Dataset for Graph Contrastive Learning in Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction" has been accepted by NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks Track.
09/2025: Ryan Hulke (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome, Ryan!
08/2025: We received a NIH NIBIB Trailblazer R21 grant ($617K, Lead PI: Yanjun Li) on Cell Morphology-guided, Scalable and Controllable Molecule Design via Generative AI. Thanks, NIH!
08/2025: Dr. Li was invited to give a talk at the Data Analytics & AI for Chemistry, Manufacturing & Healthcare Session for ACS 2025.
08/2025: Zekun Yang (MS student, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UF) and Linjun Su (MS student, Computational Science and Engineering, GT) joined the lab as PhD students. Welcome, Zekun and Linjun!
06/2025: Dr. Reza Esmaeeli (Structural Bioinformatics Scientist, Micropep Technologies) joined the lab as a postdoc associate. Welcome, Reza!
05/2025: Dr. Li was invited to give a talk at the UChicago AI-Driven Drug Discovery Workshop.
05/2025: Dr. Li received the UF College of Pharmacy Excellence in Instructional Redesign Award.
04/2025: Dr. Li was invited to serve as a grant reviewer on a NIH NICHD SBIR/STTR panel.
04/2025: Dr. Li was invited to give a talk at the RNA: From Biology to Drug Discovery 2025 Symposium.
03/2025: Our undergraduate researcher Bruce Yang was selected to the University Scholar Program. Congratulations, Bruce!
02/2025: Our postdoc researcher Dr. Qiaosi Tang was awarded as two poster winners at both the UF Health Cancer Center and the UF College of Pharmacy Annual Research Showcases. Congratulations, Qiaosi!
02/2025: Dr. Li was invited as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
02/2025: Our paper "The evolution and application of RNA-focused small molecule libraries" has been accepted by RSC Chemical Biology.
01/2025: Xinzhe Zheng (MS student, Computer Science, NUS) and Jinhang Wei (BS student, Computer Science, UMN) joined the lab as research assistants. Welcome, Xinzhe and Jinhang!
12/2024: Zekun Yang (MS student, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UF) joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome, Zekun!
11/2024: Dr. Li was invited to give a talk at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University.
11/2024: Dr. Qiaosi Tang (Scientist, Calico Life Sciences) joined the lab as a postdoc associate. Welcome, Qiaosi!
10/2024: Our paper "De novo design and optimization of aptamers with AptaDiff" has been accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics.
09/2024: We received an Artificial Intelligence and Complex Computational Research Award ($198K plus 128 A100 GPUs, PI: Yanjun Li) on Harnessing Large-scale AI for Drug Discovery Targeting Cancer. Thanks, UF Office of the Provost, UF Research Computing, and NVIDIA AI Technology Center!
08/2024: We received a NIH NCI R21 grant ($423K, PI: Zongtao Lin and Dongwen Lyu) on Hijacking Post-translational Arginylation for Targeted Protein Degradation. Thanks, NIH!
08/2024: Dr. Li was invited as a guest editor for a Special Issue of AI for Medicine and Biology, Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI). We are pleased to invite you to submit your papers!
08/2024: Dr. Rongting Yue (Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, UConn) and Zheng Feng (Ph.D., Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as postdoc associates. Welcome, Rongting and Zheng!
07/2024: Vijay Gade (MS student, Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome, Vijay!
06/2024: Dr. Li was invited as the reviewer for AAAI 2025, Cell Systems, and Nature Methods.
06/2024: Our paper "Morphological profiling for drug discovery in the era of deep learning" has been accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics.
06/2024: Bruce Yang (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as research assistant. Welcome, Bruce!
04/2024: The UF College of Pharmacy was ranked as the No. 4 best pharmacy college in America by US News. Congratulations to UF College of Pharmacy!
04/2024: Our book chapter "Analysis and Visualization of Single-Cell Sequencing Data with Scanpy and MetaCell: A Tutorial" has been accepted by Methods in Molecular Biology.
04/2024: Our paper "Identifying acute illness phenotypes via deep temporal interpolation and clustering network on physiologic signatures" has been accepted by Nature Scientific Reports.
03/2024: We received a UF Health Cancer Center Pilot Grant ($100K, PI: Yanjun Li) on Harnessing AI for RNA-targeted Drug Discovery. Thanks, UF Health Cancer Center!
03/2024: We received a UF Health Cancer Center Pilot Grant ($100K, PI: Hendrik Luesch and Ben Shen) on Natural Product Drug Discovery via Morphological Profiling. Thanks, UF Health Cancer Center!
02/2024: We received a Florida Cancer Innovation Fund Award ($750K, PI: Jessica Childs-Disney) on AI-driven Small Molecule Medicine Discovery Targeting Oncogenic RNAs. Thanks, Florida Department of Health!
02/2024: We received a Florida Cancer Innovation Fund Award ($213K, PI: Yousong Ding) on Enhancing Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment through Innovative Protein Engineering. Thanks, Florida Department of Health!
02/2024: Dr. Li was invited as the reviewer for KDD 2024 and ISMB 2024.
01/2024: Dr. Li was invited as a chair for AI-driven Drug Discovery Session at 2024 UF Drug Discovery Symposium.
01/2024: Tingyi Li (MS student, Computer Science, UF) and Hanbo Yang (MS student, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UF) joined the lab as research assistants. Welcome, Tingyi and Hanbo!
01/2024: Our paper "Extracellular Vesicles for Developing Targeted Hearing Loss Therapy" has been accepted by Journal of Controlled Release. (Cover Art)
12/2023: We received a NIH Targeted Genome Editor Delivery (TARGETED) Challenge Phase I Winner Award (PI: Mei He). Thanks, NIH!
10/2023: Our paper "BatmanNet: Bi-branch Masked Graph Transformer Autoencoder for Molecular Representation" has been accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics.
10/2023: Dr. Li was invited as a panel speaker at the BioTrends Session “Acceleration of Generative AI/Machine Learning in the Life Sciences” for the BioFlorida Annual Conference.
09/2023: Junge Gu and Riddhish Thakare (MS students, Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as research assistants. Welcome, Junge and Riddhish!
09/2023: Dr. Li was invited as the reviewer for the GenBio workshop at NeurIPS 2023 and SDM 2024.
08/2023: Dr. Li has officially joined the UF Health Cancer Center, an NCI-Designated Cancer Center.
06/2023: Shiyu Jiang (MS student, Computer Science, JHU) joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome, Shiyu!
05/2023: Weihang You (MS student, Computer Science, UF) joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome, Weihang!
04/2023: Dr. Li was invited as the program committee for KDD 2023 and AAAI 2024.
04/2023: Dr. Li was invited to give a talk at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute Chemical Biology & 5th UF Drug Discovery Symposium.
03/2023: Dr. Li officially started his position as an Assistant Professor (AI Initiative) in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Florida, College of Pharmacy. Go Gators!!!