Joshua (Yifan) Li

I am a final year DPhil student in the Toepfer/Watkins Group in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, generously supported by the Keith Murray Graduate Scholarship and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (OMT) Scholarship.

I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and completed my Intercalated MBChB/BMedSci(Hons) degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2018, graduating with First Class Honours. My Honours project was supervised by Associate Professor Ursula Rohlwink and Professor Anthony Figaji of UCT, where I investigated the role of matrix metalloproteinases in paediatric tuberculous meningitis. After graduation, I finished my 2-year medical internship at Worcester Hospital and my year of public service in General Surgery at Mahikeng Provincial Hospital, South Africa. I subsequently worked as an Emergency Medicine Registrar in Dublin for 9 months prior to commencing my DPhil in Lincoln College, Oxford. I hold full registrations in the GMC and HPCSA, as well as other postgraduate medical certifications.

Now, under the supervision of Associate Professor Christopher Toepfer and Professor Hugh Watkins, I am using tissue engineering to investigate the role of novel gene variants in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). A recent meta-analysis of GWAS (Tadros et al 2025, Nature Genetics) identified truncating variants in SVIL (encoding the protein Supervillin) as a novel HCM disease gene. I have since created an iPSC-cardiomyocyte model using CRISPR/Cas-9 to investigate the pathomechanism of how SVIL truncation cause HCM. Using functional phenotyping and multi-omics analyses, I have elucidated novel insight into how loss of function of this important Z-disc/costameric gene cause HCM.

Outside the lab, I am a locum Specialist Registrar doctor at the John Radcliffe Hospital Emergency Department, an examiner at the Oxford Medical School, and a Clinical Lecturer at Lincoln College.