Zihai Li, MD, PhD

Director
2024-2027

Dr. Zihai Li is an American Board of Internal Medicine-certified medical oncologist, cancer immunologist, elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the Klotz Memorial Chair in Cancer Research, Professor and Founding Director of the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. An expert in the field of GP96/GRP94 chaperone biology, Li established its roles in immunity, development, and cancer by advancing the knowledge of its client network, structure-function relationship, and its co-chaperone CNPY3. He uncovered the roles of the TGFβ-GARP axis and platelets in immune tolerance and cancer immunotherapy, and discovered CNPY2 as a key initiator of the unfolded protein response. More recently, he is credited for his work in linking androgen receptor and CD8⁺ T cell exhaustion in the tumor as one of the bases for sex bias in cancer.  Much of his ongoing research centers around understanding the mechanisms of immune regulation in cancer, and with a focus on developing better cancer immunotherapeutics. He has authored over 180 manuscripts on these topics. His laboratory has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for the last two decades with a total funding of over $26 million.

A passionate educator and mentor, Li has trained more than 60 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty members. Li earned his medical degrees from Zhengzhou University and Peking Union Medical College, and his PhD in immunology with Dr. Pramod Srivastava from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 1993. He completed his internal medicine residency in the Montefiore-Einstein Medical Center and his medical oncology fellowship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington.