Leanne Li is a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. She received an MD from National Taiwan University and a PhD in cancer biology from EPFL, Switzerland. During her training as a PhD student with Douglas Hanahan and a postdoctoral fellow with Tyler Jacks at MIT, she used genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) of pancreatic and lung cancers to investigate how the crosstalk between cancer genetics and tumor microenvironment influences disease progression. Her research revealed that certain cancers exploit neuronal signaling pathways to respond to microenvironmental cues, thereby promoting tumor progression. Revealing this unexpected link between cancer biology and neuroscience earned her the Junior Debiopharm Life Sciences Award and Pfizer Research Award.

In the Cancer Neuroscience Laboratory she leads at the Crick since 2020, her team uses GEMMs of various cancer types combined with modern neuroscience methodology to study the interaction between cancer and the nervous system, focusing on three major aspects: cancer intrinsic neuronal properties, local/tumor microenvironmental interactions, and distal/systemic interactions.