Rate My Professor Bowen Li

Bowen Li is an Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, with cross-appointments in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Chemistry. He holds the Canada Research Chair in RNA Vaccines & Therapeutics and the GSK Chair in Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery. Li earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Washington-Seattle in 2019 and completed postdoctoral training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT from 2019 to 2022. His research focuses on developing nonviral biomaterial-based platforms, including lipid nanoparticles, for the delivery of nucleic acids such as mRNA, siRNA, and CRISPR-Cas9 components, with applications in vaccines, cancer immunotherapy, gene editing, and regenerative medicine.

Li has received numerous awards and honors, including the Terry Fox New Investigator Award, the Connaught Innovation Award, the Gairdner Early Career Investigator Award, the Ontario Early Researcher Award, and the AAPS Emerging Leader Award. He serves as Associate Editor for Molecular Therapy and the Journal of Nanobiotechnology and participates in grant review panels for agencies such as CIHR and NIH. Li is an affiliate scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.