Li Gan, PhD

Dr. Gan is the director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer’s Disease Research Institute and the Burton P. and Judith B. Resnick Distinguished Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Gan received a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology in 1990 from Peking University in Beijing and a doctorate in cellular and molecular physiology in 1996 from Yale University School of Medicine. She completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, where she became a senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, and professor-in-residence at UCSF, joining Weill Cornell Medicine in July 2018.

Dr. Gan’s research focuses on innate immunity and proteostasis, the converging and interconnected pathways in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). On the proteostasis front, her work linked endolysosomal dysfunction with amyloid beta degradation in AD and aberrant acetylation with tau degradation and toxicity in FTD. Her research also aims at dissecting how maladaptive innate immune responses lead to functional deficits, proteostasis malfunction, and disease progression. Her earlier work uncovered a novel epigenetic mechanism underlying the interplay of NF-kB hyperactivation and SIRT1 in aging-associated chronic inflammation. Her research also identified a critical role of microglial NFκB-TNFα hyperactivation in obsessive-compulsive behavior observed in progranulin deficient FTD mouse models. Her most recent work focuses on the functional consequence and underlying mechanism of mutations on TREM2, the strongest innate immune risk factor in AD.