Yun Rose Li, MD PhD is an assistant professor and physician scientist in the department of radiation oncology and cancer genetics/epigenetics at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, California. She also holds a joint appointment in the division of quantitative medicine and systems biology at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

After graduating summa cum laude from Duke University with a BS in chemistry in 2010, she went on to complete her MD and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). During her residency and research fellowship at the University of California San Francisco, Rose worked as 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. In her particular her focus was on the role of lifestyle risk factors such as obesity, high fat diet and chronic inflammation in carcinogenesis.

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, 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.

Rose’s work has resulted in first author publications in the Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and Science Signaling as well as over 60 coauthored manuscripts in such journals as Nature, Science, Am. J. of Human Genetics, Neurology, Nature Neuroscience, the Lancet and a number of patents. She has been invited to give talks in the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Spain. Her work at the City of Hope is funded by an NIH K12 career development award as well as industry sponsored awards.

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