Didong LiView profile
Assistant Professor
Dr. Didong Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gillings School of Global Public Health , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on statistical methods for complex data, including manifold learning, nonparametric Bayesian inference, and spatial statistics, with applications in healthcare, genomics, and environmental health. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Duke University (2020), and degrees from Beijing Institute of Technology (BS 2012, MS 2015). His research interests include dimension reduction, Gaussian processes, geometric data analysis, and network analysis. He has developed novel methods for analyzing electronic health records, single-cell RNA sequencing data, and spatial omics datasets. Notable contributions include the spherelet manifold approximation framework and the STimage-1K4M dataset. Dr. Li has received the Inaugural IMS Lawrence D. Brown PhD Student Award (2019) . He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and organized sessions at JSM 2021-2022 on geometric Bayesian methods. His lab supports interdisciplinary collaborations, with ongoing projects in spatial transcriptomics, healthcare access analysis, and AI-driven medical informatics. Advising highlights include guiding students through successful PhD defenses (e.g., Dr. Sam Hawke, Dr. Jiawen Chen) and postdoctoral placements. His team secured a NVIDIA Academic Grant (2024) for multi-modal AI in spatial transcriptomics. The Li Lab maintains active partnerships with institutions worldwide, advancing both statistical theory and real-world applications.










