About Me

Contact Information
Email:
haikuo.li@wustl.edu; lihaikuo@alumni.sjtu.edu.cn
Address:
Campus Box 8226, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO
WeChat/QQ: 410650989

My Background
My name is Haikuo Li (李海廓). I was born in Linyi (hometown of Zhuge Liang and Wang Xizhi), Shandong Province, China in 1997 and lived there before my undergraduate life.

In high school, I was most interested in mathematics and won the Bronze Medal in 2014 Chinese Mathematics Olympics. At that point, I learned that biology had entered a big data era and required multidisciplinary approaches such as mathematical modelling and statistics to solve cutting-edge genomic problems. Therefore, I chose bioscience as my undergraduate major at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). At SJTU, I was mainly trained in biochemistry and systems biology and led a first-author project in which we identified biomarkers for lymphoma patients with mass spectrometry-based proteomics. In my 4th year, I worked as a visiting undergraduate researcher at Yale University Department of Immunobiology to broaden my knowledge in immunology. I was awarded Shanghai Excellent Graduate in Bachelor Degree in 2019.

I started my PhD study at Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. At WashU DBBS, I matriculated in the Program in Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology with my background in proteomics. During my first-year PhD training at WashU, I learned that advances in single-cell genomics improved our understanding of tissue heterogeneity and underlying cellular events in disease, and therefore, I transferred to the Program in Molecular Genetics and Genomics with huge passion in using single-cell technologies to better precision medicine.

Since joining the Humphreys Lab in 2020, I have developed deep expertise in both wet-lab (single-cell library generation, technology development, mouse surgery, tissue culture, microscope imaging etc.) and dry-lab skills (single-cell data preprocessing, analysis, visualization and computational modelling), and have completed several first author research and review articles on single-cell technology development and applications. My thesis projects aim to identify kidney metabolic heterogeneity and decipher cellular events that drive kidney fibrosis with high-throughput single-cell multiomics approaches. We specifically selected single-cell combinatorial indexing (sci) as the platform, leveraging its unique advantage in ultra-high throughput, sample multiplexing capacity and low costs, compared to the current popular 10X Genomics solution. The ultimate goal is to identify potential therapeutic targets that can be used to ameliorate kidney disease progression.

My Hobby
I love reading and writing Chinese prose/poetry in my spare time. WeChat Official Account/Blog: Haikuo_Sky1997 (北乔木).
I enjoy cooking and I am a soccer fan of Shandong Luneng FC.

Gallery