Join the College of Science and Technology in welcoming Dr. Wen-Hsuing Li for a Dean's Distinguished Lecture. Wen-Hsiung Li is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and James D. Watson Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His research interests include molecular and genomic evolution, methods for DNA sequence and genomic data analysis, computational biology and synthetic biology. 

Dr. Li will be presenting about his research: "Evolving infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in humans and other primates" in which he investigates how much the increase in SARS-CoV-2 infectivity was due to mutations in S-protein. Particularly, if S-protein variants have increased binding affinity to primate ACE2 variants, so that they became more infectious. His lab addressed these questions using both experimental and computational structural biology approaches. These studies increase our understanding of how the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 has evolved in humans and other primates.