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 Ph.D. in cellular and molecular physiology from Yale University School of Medicine, and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she was a senior investigator and associate director at Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, and professor of Neurology at UCSF before joining 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 acetylation of tau as a new posttranslational mechanism underlying tau toxicity, identified maladaptive microglial mechanisms in neurodegeneration, and developed scalable neural iPSC-derived models widely used in the scientific community. Dr. Gan is recipient of Glenn Award in Aging Research, Alzheimer’s Association’s Inge Grundke-Iqbal Award for Alzheimer’s Research, and most recently the Helis Prize for Parkinson’s Disease and Neurodegenerative research in 2022.