Wei Li, PhD

Dr. Wei Li is an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He completed his doctoral studies at University of Nebraska Medical Center and has previously held positions at Tufts University in Boston, MA. Li’s laboratory recently developed a new technology to globally identify all autoantibodies in patient blood and quantify their activities like a fingerprint map with thousands of autoantibody peaks at different activities. He will quantitatively compare these digital fingerprint maps for multiple patients versus healthy controls to systematically identify disease-related autoantibodies as biomarkers for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In addition to this AHAF award, Li is the recipient of four other awards from other foundations to study autoantibody biomarkers for other diseases, including glaucoma, type I diabetes, and cancers. His laboratory is also supported by a research grant from National Institute of Health.