Bo Li earned her B.S. in biological sciences from Beijing University in 2004 and her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. As a graduate student, she worked with Prof. Wilfred van der Donk, studying the enzymatic transformations responsible for making lanthionine-containing peptides. She conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow, using chemical and microbial genetic tools to characterize the biosynthesis and mode of action of antibiotics. Bo Li joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 and is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry. Li’s group integrates chemistry and bacterial genomics to identify bacterial small molecules and unravels the mechanisms by which these molecules inhibit or enable bacterial infections. She has received a Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award.