Zhaoping Li, MD, PhD is the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Human Nutrition and Professor of Medicine at David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She currently serves as Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine, Director of the Center for Human Nutrition and Chief of Clinical Nutrition at UCLA. She is also Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Health Care System.  

Dr Li earned her MD and PhD in Physiology from Peking University, China. She then completed her postdoctoral research and medical residency training at UCLA and has been a faculty member there since 1997. She is board-certified in internal medicine, physician nutrition specialists, and a fellow of the American College of Physicians.  Her research interests focus on the role of diet and nutrition in coronary artery disease, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases. Most recently, she has been working on individual metabolic phenotypes for precision nutrition. Dr Li has been a principal investigator for over 100 investigator-initiated NIH and industry-sponsored clinical trials and has published over 240 peer-reviewed scientific papers.  She has co-authored two textbooks, Primary Care Nutrition: Writing the Nutrition Prescription and Nutritional Oncology, both published by CRC Press, with her third textbook, Precision Nutrition, published by Elsevier in November 2023.

Dr Li has provided national and international leadership in nutrition, serving as President of the National Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists (NBPNS) from 2018 to 2020 and President of the World Association of Chinese Doctors in Clinical Nutrition from 2015 to 2021. She has been an active member of the American Society for Nutrition since 2009, where she has served on the ASN Board of Directors (2017-2019) and various committees.