Trained as a stem cell biologist, Dr. Zhongwei Li has been using mouse models, human pluripotent stem cells, kidney progenitor cells, and kidney organoids as model systems to study stem cell biology, organ regeneration, and disease modeling for more than 17 years. As a graduate student in Dr. Ye-Guang Chen’s lab at Tsinghua University (2007-2012), he studied the molecular mechanisms of how different signaling pathways coordinate to determine pluripotent stem cell fates. Dr. Li identified a novel signaling cascade, BMP/Smad/DUSP9/ERK, essential in the crosstalk and intracellular integration of extrinsic signals (LIF and BMP) to regulate pluripotent stem cell fates (Li et al., Cell Stem Cell, 2012). As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte's lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (2012-2017), he focused on kidney regeneration and developed a three-dimensional culture system which enabled, for the first time, the long-term expansion of primary nephron progenitor cells, which can further generate nephrons, the functional units of the kidney, in a nephron organoid model in vitro and in a chimeric mouse model in vivo (Li et al., Cell Stem Cell, 2016). As an assistant professor at USC (2017-present), his long-term research goal is to engineer a synthetic kidney from stem cells as an alternative off-the-shelf source for kidney transplantation (funded by NIH Director’s New Innovator Award). Dr. Li’s short-term research goal is to develop next-generation mature and functional kidney organoid models for kidney disease modeling and drug discovery (Zeng et al., Nature Communications, 2021; Huang et al., Cell Stem Cell, 2024). His research combines state-of-the-art stem cell technologies, genome editing tools, and bioengineering approaches to achieve these goals. Dr. Li’s lab integrates research strategies from a broad range of disciplines including molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and bioengineering.