Pulin Li is interested in quantitatively understanding how genetic circuits create multicellular behavior in both natural and synthetically engineered systems.

Li’s postdoctoral research work focused on tissue patterning — a fascinating example of emergent behaviors in groups of cells — centering on a key developmental mechanism called morphogen gradients.

The essential role of the flexible termini in the temperature-responsiveness of the oligomeric state and chaperone-like activity for the polydisperse small heat shock protein … OJ Tamplin, RM...

Dr. Pulin Li is a member of the Whitehead Institute and the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor in the Department of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pulin Li completed her PhD training in Chemical Biology at Harvard University with Dr. Leonard Zon and post-doctoral work at California Institute of Technology with Dr. Michael Elowitz. She moved back to Cambridge and started her lab in 2019.

Whitehead Institute announced today that the developmental and synthetic biologist Pulin Li will join the Institute in May as its newest Member. Li will also be appointed an assistant professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

We aim to provide both fundamental insights into tissue biology and new methods for tissue engineering. Within a tissue, a cell’s position is critically linked to its fate. How does a cell determine its position relative to other cells?

Enrollment Year - 2006. Zon Lab - Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University.

Professor Li studies how circuits of interacting genes in individual cells enable multicellular functions, such as self-organizing into complex tissues. She combines approaches from synthetic biology, developmental/stem cell biology, biophysics, and bioengineering to build and quantitatively analyze these multicellular behaviors.

May 1, 2024 · In this Q&A, Whitehead Institute Member Pulin Li discusses how her lab ventures beyond mere observation to actually engineer developmental events in the Petri dish, and why this approach is vital for understanding health and disease more broadly.