Mengyao Li Honored as 2026 Jane Coffin Childs Fellow
Li is one of thirty-two outstanding postdoctoral fellows selected as awardees to this distinguished fellowship program in biomedical research.
Dr. Mengyao Li, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Thomas D. and Virginia Cabot Associate Professor Xiao Wang, has been named a 2026 Jane Coffin Childs Fellow.
Li’s research with the Wang Lab seeks to decipher the hidden spatial code governing how cells translate RNA into functional proteins. By exploring how the subcellular organization of transcripts dictates their translation kinetics, Li aims to uncover how dynamic shifts in RNA translational efficiency ultimately orchestrate cellular states, tissue architecture, and disease.
Li has long been fascinated by how cells, despite sharing an identical genome, achieve distinct identities and tissue types through epigenetic regulation. During her graduate studies in Fuchou Tang’s lab at Peking University and Kehkooi Kee’s lab at Tsinghua University, she traced the epigenetic dynamics and lineage differentiation that guide cell fate decisions during early mammalian embryogenesis. To do this, she utilized an ultra-sensitive, long-read sequencing-based chromatin accessibility profiling method she developed for scarce, single-cell-input samples. This method enabled her to dissect the epigenetic regulation of repetitive elements and the X chromosome, systematically delineating the cell-type-specific transcription factor regulatory networks that drive early development.
The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (JCC Fund) is an unwavering supporter of biomedical research, having funded early-career researchers for nearly ninety years. The JCC Fund advances pioneering science by backing brilliant postdoctoral fellows conducting fundamental research on cancer and human disease.
Fellows were selected by the Board of Scientific Advisors from an extraordinary applicant pool. Awardees are chosen based on their research accomplishments to date, their research plans, and their proposed scientific environments and mentors. These awardees are conducting research that will inform our understanding of diseases such as ALS, autoimmunity, cancer, and sepsis. Project goals range from mapping how tumor cells access nutrients—to inform anti-tumor growth therapies—to defining host cooperative defenses against bacterial infection to prevent sepsis.
“The 2026 JCC Fellows represent something we all need right now: scientists with the training, the drive, and the imagination to ask questions the rest of us haven’t thought to ask yet,” said Sue Biggins, Ph.D., chair of the JCC Fund’s Board of Scientific Advisors. “This recognition honors their exceptional graduate work — and makes a bet on the breakthroughs still to come. At a difficult moment for science, it is exciting to celebrate this cohort and invest in our future.” Biggins is an HHMI Investigator, Director of the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, and a former JCC Fund Fellow.
“We are thrilled to have our third-largest cohort of fellows since our founding,” said Anita Pepper, Ph.D., executive director of the JCC Fund. “We are grateful to our philanthropic partners, whose investments in JCC’s tried-and-true model of catalyzing remarkable scientific careers alongside cutting-edge scientific impact make this expansion possible.”
The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research was established by the Childs family in 1937 to honor the memory of Jane Coffin Childs. Inspired by its founding purpose to support research into the causes and treatment of cancer, the Fund’s mission has broadened to support fundamental scientific research that advances our understanding of the causes, treatments, and cures for human disease.
