Dr. Min Li is George Lynn Cross Professor of Medicine, Surgery, and Cell Biology at The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), and holds the Virginia Kerley Cade Endowed Chair in Cancer Treatment. He is the Assistant Dean for International Research Collaboration at College of Medicine, and Associate Director for Global Oncology at the NCI designated Stephenson Cancer Center (SCC). He is also the Vice Chair for Research at the Department of Medicine, and Co-Leader of Cancer Biology Program of SCC at OUHSC. He is a leading expert on pancreatic cancer (PC), and his research mainly focus on studying PC pathogenesis and developing new therapies. Dr. Li’s group is the first to identify a key zinc transporter ZIP4, which is aberrantly expressed in PC, and promotes cancer growth, drug resistance, muscle wasting, cachexia, and metastasis. Current projects in his laboratory include the role of ZIP4 in PC progression and pathogenesis, the therapeutic potential for ZIP4 silencing, the function of microRNAs in ZIP4-mediated tumor growth, signaling transduction and metabolism in PC, and cancer cachexia. He has published more than 220 papers on high impact journals such as Cancer Cell, Nature, PNAS, EMBO Mol Med, Nature Communications, Gastroenterology, Can Res, Clin Can Res, JAMA Network Open, etc., and has three active NIH/NCI R01 grants, and multiple private foundation grants.  

Dr. Li is a member of many NIH study sections, such as Developmental Therapeutics (DT), Cancer Etiology (CE), Basic Mechanism of Cancer Therapy (BMCT), Clinical Oncology (CONC), Mouse Model of Translational Cancer Research (MMTR), GI SPORE, Omnibus R21, DoD Cancer Research Program, AACR Pancreatic cancer action network (PanCAN), French NCI, Austrian Science Fund, Prostate Cancer UK, etc. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editor, and editorial board member for many prestigious journals such as Cancer Letters, Clin Can Res, and BMC Medicine. Dr. Li holds many important administrative positions in OUHSC, and he serve on multiple committees locally, nationally, and internationally. Dr. Li is the past President of American Pancreatic Association (APA). He is also the council member of the International Association for Pancreatology (IAP). He received many awards such as the Outstanding Achievement Award of IAP, the Provost Research Award at OUHSC, the Scott McMeekin MD Cancer Research Award, and the Palade Prize of IAP.