Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The UCLA Department of Statistics and Data Science proudly congratulates Professor Jingyi Jessica Li on being named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This year marks the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows—an enduring legacy of honoring individuals who have demonstrated exceptional scholarly productivity or creative ability in the arts and sciences.
Founded in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most prestigious honors in the United States, awarded through a rigorous peer-review process. The fellowship provides recipients with the freedom to pursue their work with as few constraints as possible, supporting bold and innovative scholarship across disciplines. More details about the Guggenheim Fellowship are available here.
Professor Li is a leading expert at the intersection of statistics, data science, and genomics. Her research focuses on developing principled, efficient, and interpretable statistical methods to advance biomedical science. She addresses critical challenges in transcriptomics, single-cell analysis, and machine learning, with particular emphasis on reducing false positives and improving the reliability of genomic discoveries.
Her contributions have significantly advanced our understanding of gene expression, the quantification of the central dogma of molecular biology, and the development of statistical frameworks for large-scale RNA sequencing and disease classification. At UCLA, Professor Li holds joint appointments in Statistics, Biostatistics, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics, and serves on the faculty of the interdepartmental doctoral program in bioinformatics. She also leads the Junction of Statistics and Biology Lab, where her team bridges statistical innovation with impactful biomedical applications.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will support Professor Li’s ongoing work to enhance the rigor and interpretability of high-throughput genomic data analysis—research with broad implications for biology, medicine, and public health.
We are proud to celebrate this remarkable recognition and honored to have Professor Li as a core member of our department.