Dr. Lei Li graduated from Shandong University, China, in 2005 with a B.S. in Biotechnology. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology at Shandong University in 2010. During his Ph.D. studies, from 2007 to 2009, he joined Dr. Peng George Wang's lab at The Ohio State University as a visiting scholar, where he focused on elucidating the biosynthetic pathways of lipopolysaccharides and synthesizing biomedical-related glycans.

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After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Li spent two years as a Postdoctoral Associate at Nankai University, concentrating on the chemoenzymatic synthesis of complex glycans and sugar nucleotides. In 2013, he joined Dr. Peng George Wang's group at Georgia State University as Research Scientist I and was later promoted to Senior Research Scientist in 2018. During this time, he established independent research programs in microbial glycobiology and glycomics with NIH funding.

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In 2020, Dr. Li became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. His research interests include the chemoenzymatic synthesis of complex carbohydrates and glycoconjugates, the development of glycomics tools to study glycan-protein interactions, and carbohydrate-based vaccines and therapeutics targeting antibiotic-resistant bacteria.