Ronald Li, PhD - CEO and Founder of Novoheart as well as its parent company Medera.

Ronald Li is an academic-turned serial entrepreneur with successful track records in biotech from fundraising, public listing, mergers and acquisitions, privatization, joint ventures, licensing and corporate finance. Medera focuses on next-generation cell and gene therapies for difficult-to-treat and incurable diseases. Medera’s portfolio companies include: Novoheart for Disease Modelling & Drug Discovery, Sardocor for gene therapy clinical trials, and Xellera Therapeutics for scalable Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP)-compliant manufacturing of clinical-grade next-generation therapeutics such as CAR-T for patients.

Dr. Li is an internationally recognized expert in cardiac electrophysiology, human heart cell & tissue engineering and pluripotent stem cells with over 200 peer-reviewed publications. Prior to his entrepreneurial venture, he was Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Davis and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan.

Dr. Li was also the Former Director of Ming-Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. During his tenure at Johns Hopkins, Professor Li was a two-time recipient of the Top Young Faculty Award, in addition to being named Top Young Investigator and Top Postdoc Fellow. He also won numerous awards including the Young Investigator Award 1st Prize of Heart Rhythm Society, the American Heart Association Best Study of 2005 and Groundbreaking Study of the 2006 for his work on the first genetically-engineered human pluripotent stem cell-derived heart cells as well as cell- and gene-based biopacemakers. He was named Distinguished Visiting Professor by the University of Toronto and Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Waterloo, Canada.