Dr. Wei Li is currently a UTHSC Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), and the Director of UTHSC College of Pharmacy Drug Discovery Center. He is also the Founder and CSO of SEAK Therapeutics LLC, a UTHSC spin-off startup company focusing on developing small molecule therapeutic agents originally invented in his lab. Dr. Li obtained his BS degree in chemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992. After a two-year graduate study at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he went to Columbia University and obtained his PhD degree in chemistry in 1999. He has been working at UTHSC College of Pharmacy since 1999. His research focus is medicinal chemistry and small molecule drug discovery. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, 5 book chapters, and is an inventor of more than ten issued US patents and a larger number of related patents in other countries. Dr. Li has been actively serving as a grant reviewer for several US government, state, and foreign funding agencies. He is also a frequent reviewer for journal articles and is serving as an editorial board member for several journals.