University of Pittsburgh
Anna Li is an MD-PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University with clinical and research focuses on Emergency Medicine and Computational Biology, respectively, and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is the queer, Chinese American daughter of immigrants and is well versed in barriers to healthcare access, both practical and psychological and from a systems and patient care perspective. She has been in cystic fibrosis research since high school, in 2013, due to having a close friend in high school with cystic fibrosis. Her initial research experience was at Scott Randell’s lab at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and she did her senior thesis there on directed “smart stem cell” migration to optimize lung engraftment in cell therapy for cystic fibrosis. She then graduated from Duke University, Class of 2018, and took two gap years at Pradeep Singh’s lab understanding mechanisms of bacterial persistence and antibiotic resistance in the cystic fibrosis lung. In 2020, she began the MD PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now working on her PhD thesis on using experimental evolution to engineer bacteriophages with higher efficacy and larger host range to treat cystic fibrosis patients.
In addition to her research background, Anna strives to use her engineering background combined with her learnings as a medical student to solve inefficiencies and misaligned incentives in healthcare. She is the CEO/Founder of Korion Health, which builds an affordable electronic stethoscope and guided interface to enable people to get DIY heart and lung sound screenings from home, and has raised nearly $2M to date, including from the $1M Global Hult Prize Competition. Through her work with Korion, Anna was named first place in the UpPrize Social Innovation Challenge for Racial Equity, the first place winner of the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator, was first place for the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Innovation Challenge and later invited back as the keynote speaker in 2024, a double first-place winner for the Pitt Challenge Healthcare Hackathon in both 2020 and 2021 as well as the keynote speaker in 2022, and have done a successful crowdfunding raise through Honeycomb Credit, and have completed an MVP and two formative usability studies, among other adventures. Her dog, Winston, also won second place for “Best Walk” in the Lawrenceville Row House Cinema Dog Show, and is a therapy dog at UPMC.
Thursday, October 23, 2025
10:15 AM - 12:15 PM PDT