Our Team

Li Li

Principal Research Fellow

Phone: +61 2 6773 3790

Email: lli4@une.edu.au

After graduating from the Bachelor in Forestry at Jiangxi Agricultural University in 1992, Dr Li Li started his research career at Jiangxi Province Forestry Institute on a project involving the genetic improvement of Chinese fir, the most important forest plantation in southern China. After four years of hard but rewarding research work, he was motivated to pursue his career with higher degrees and studied for his Master’s degree (majored in tree breeding, 1996-1998) and doctorate (majored in quantitative genetics in forestry, 1998-2001) at Nanjing Forestry University. In 2003, he conducted post-doctoral research in CSIRO (Canberra) on Australian Radiata pine breeding.

In 2005, he was employed as a research fellow at AGBU. Since then, his research interest has focused on applying the theory of quantitative genetics and breeding to improve productivity in livestock and plant production. Dr Li’s current research work is in three main areas:

  1. Developing genetic evaluation systems to select for animal and plant industries
  2. Conducting genetic analysis of phenotypic and genomic data in plant and livestock species
  3. Applying animal breeding theory and methods to crop species by collaborating with crop breeders from the University of Western Australia

He has engaged in developing, upgrading and, maintaining AGBU’s genetic evaluation systems for all species. This includes

  1. upgrading PIGBLUP software for pigs
  2. upgrading TREEPLAN software package from Version 2 to Version 3 for forestry
  3. developing innovative algorithms and software for calculation of the accuracy of genomic breeding values for BREEDPLAN (beef cattle) and Sheep Genetics (sheep). These genetic evaluation systems are used by thousands of breeders worldwide daily, resulting in significant increases in the profitability of respective industries.