Dr. Jie Li began his tenure-track assistant professor position in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina in 2019. Despite developing his lab during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Li has rapidly established his research reputation. His lab’s research, themed around natural products biosynthesis and biological activities, represents a frontier of natural products research. This research and his diverse collaborative efforts have yielded 18 publications.
A few highlights include:
1) Development of a correlation-guided genome-mining strategy (Nature Communications2022), leading to identification of bacterial M16B metallopeptidases as a new family of lanthipeptide proteases and the subsequent engineering of novel lanthipeptide natural products with enhanced antimicrobial activity (ACS Chemical Biology 2023).
2) Revealing the chemistry at the human-microbiota interface that affects human health, leading to the discovery of sulfonolipids biosynthesis in gut microbiota (ACS Chemical Biology 2022) and their dual immunomodulatory activity (Nature Communications 2024).
3) His lab’s research was also highlighted by USC news (https://www.sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/covid_inhibitor_research_jie_li.php#.YVkkv5rMKUk) and has led to two patent applications.
Dr. Li has supervised/is supervising four postdoctoral fellows, five graduate students and over 40 undergraduate and high school students. His outstanding mentoring has been witnessed by his mentees winning numerous awards, such as the USC Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award (https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/about/news/2023/older_graduate_scholar.php), American Society of Pharmacognosy graduate research award, NIH SC-INBRE Student-Initiated Research Projects Award, Donna and Andrew Sorensen Graduate Student Fellowship for Cancer Research, Royal Society of Chemistry Certificate of Undergraduate Excellence Award and South Carolina Section ACS Outstanding Biochemistry Student Award.
His lab has secured more than $3,150,000 in extramural funding, including NSF CAREER and NIH R35 MIRA awards. His excellence in both research and teaching has earned him the College of Arts and Sciences’ 2024 McCausland Faculty Fellowship, 2020 USC Two Thumbs Up Award, and 2023 NIH-USC “R25 Big Data Health Science Fellow.”