Dr. Li Gan is director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer’s Disease Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she is also the Burton P. and Judith B. Resnick Distinguished Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Dr. Gan received a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology from Peking University, in Beijing, and a doctorate in cellular and molecular physiology from Yale University School of Medicine. She completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she rose through the ranks to become a senior investigator at Gladstone and professor-in-residence at UCSF. She joined Weill Cornell Medicine in July 2018.

Dr. Gan’s research focuses on innate immunity and proteostasis–the converging and interconnected pathways in such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. Her lab discovered that acetylation of tau is a new posttranslational mechanism underlying pathogenic tau accumulation, discovered toxic microglial mechanisms in neurodegeneration, and developed scalable neural iPSC-derived models that are widely used in the scientific community.