Yun Li, PhD is a faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, associate professor of Biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, and a senior scholar at PennMed's Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Dr. Li conducts methodological research in causal inference, unmeasured confounding, missing data, longitudinal analysis, survival analysis, mediation, Bayesian analyses, and survey methods. She has led the effort in database management, data integrity, and rigorous and robust analytical methods in many multicenter studies and NIH-funded program projects in biomedical science. Her research areas in the past two decades include infectious disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, head-and-neck cancer, kidney disease, cardiovascular diseases, and liver disease. Needs that arose in the course of her collaborative work have inspired her to innovate in statistical methods research, and she has led the development of statistical methods to tackle the statistical issues in these clinical studies.

Her methodological work has involved four key areas: 1) intermediate outcomes; 2) time-dependent treatments; 3) unmeasured confounders; and 4) missing data. Of note, her early methods work was among the first to propose a causal inference framework for evaluating surrogate endpoints, such as intermediate biomarkers, surrogate markers, or mediators.

Dr. Li is actively involved in the PhD program in Biostatistics and the Master's of Science in Clinical Epidemiology programs at Penn. She also regularly serves as faculty mentor to junior investigators.

Prior to her work at CHOP and Penn, Dr. Li was a research associate professor at the University of Michigan (UM). Dr. Li earned her PhD in Biostatistics from UM, following a period of highly effective collaborative work at Duke University Clinical Research Institute. She joined the UM Biostatistics faculty after graduation.