Yun Rose Li, M.D., Ph.D.

Yun Rose Li, M.D., Ph.D., is an assistant professor and physician scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Department of Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics at  City of Hope in Duarte, California. She also holds a joint appointment in the Division of Quantitative Medicine and Systems Biology at Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix. 

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After graduating summa cum laude from Duke University with a B.S. in chemistry in 2010, she went on to complete her M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her Ph.D. dissertation, for which Li was honored as the 2016 CHOP Distinguish Trainee, was focused on identifying common genetic risk factors underlying pediatric autoimmune diseases across a cohort of over 40,000 patients. In addition, she helped launch iGeneTRAiN — an international consortium across 22 research institutions from five continents that are applying next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to the identification of genetic markers for solid organ transplant rejection — and worked on developing proteomic platforms to study acute rejection in routine biopsy samples following cardiac transplantation as a visiting scholar at Stanford. 

During her residency and research fellowship at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Li worked with Professor Allan Balmain, Ph.D., as a part of the ABR Holman Research Pathway Fellow. She is a member of the Mutographs Project, an international team funded by the Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge Grant, which is pioneering the use of mutational patterns from cancer genomes to identify the etiology of human cancers of unknown etiologies. Her particular focus was on the role of lifestyle risk factors such as obesity, high-fat diet and chronic inflammation. During her clinical training at UCSF, she was mentored by world-recognized experts in genitourinary radiation oncology including Felix Feng, M.D., and Mack Roach, M.D. For her research projects, she was awarded the NRG/RTOG New Investigator Award in 2019. In addition, Li is interested in improving the quality of life and access to precision medicine for patients with advanced and metastatic cancer. She has received several grants from UCSF to develop a Phase 1 trial to improve patient access to care and to identify the barriers to early palliative care referrals for patients with metastatic cancer. 

As a physician-scientist at City of Hope, she applies a combination of state-of-the-art computational biology and molecular biology approaches to better understand the dual role of oxidative stress and inflammation in cancer risk and treatment response. Her work lies at the interface between cancer genomics, metabolism and immunology, with a goal of understanding the mechanisms underlying metabolic modulation of normal tissue and cancer cell inflammatory response, and with an eventual goal of applying these principles to improving the therapeutic efficacy of radiation therapy while also reducing treatment toxicity. Her clinical expertise and focus are on patients with prostate, bladder, renal, testicular and colorectal cancers. She will be leading a Phase 2 clinical trial to test the tolerability and efficacy of using intermittent fasting to mitigate the toxicity of pelvic radiotherapy and potentially improve tumor response. 

Li's work has resulted in first-author publications in Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and Science Signaling as well as over 60 co-authored manuscripts in such journals as Nature, Science, American Journal of Human Genetics, Neurology, Nature Neuroscience, and the Lancet, as well as a number of patents. She has won research awards and given talks at the American Society for Clinical Oncology, American Society for Radiation Oncology, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium/American Association for Cancer Research and Human Genome Meeting. Li is the recipient of a number of grants including National Institutes of Health predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and the Junior Investigator Pilot Grant at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her work at the City of Hope is funded by an NIH K12 career development award as well as industry-sponsored awards. 

Outside of work, Li has served in advisory and consulting roles for health care, biomedical and IT startups and organizations, including Shearwater International, BreakOut Labs, DreamIt Venture Healthcare Program, and CrowdMed. She is a strong advocate for diversity and reducing burnout in medicine. She has served previously as a member of the resident committee of the American College for Radiation Oncology (ACRO), UCSF Cancer Center Committee, and co-chair of the UCSF Resident and Fellows Council Committee. She presently is a part of the ACRO New Practitioners Committee and an advisory member to the American Society for Cell Biology’s Programming Taskforce.  

In her free time, Li enjoys spending time with family, writing poetry, playing the piano, snowboarding, surfing, horseback riding and traveling the world.