Hua Li received an M.S. in forestry genetics from Beijing Forestry University in China and a Ph.D. in bioinformatics from North Carolina State University. During postdoctoral studies at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, she developed software (in C, SAS and R) for mass Affymetrix gene-chip data analysis and designed greenhouse and Affymetrix gene expression experiments. In 2006, she joined the Stowers Institute and completed her postdoctoral training in 2007. During that time, Li applied bi-variate analysis to improve the power of genome-wide association studies and constructed a Bayesian network using relaxed gene ordering. She became the Computational Biology group leader in 2009 and Head of Computational Biology in 2017. With over 10 years of bioinformatics experience, Li was appointed Director of Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biostatistics in 2019.