Brian S.-K. Li is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. At the MPIWG, he is a member of the Max Planck Research Group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body." He is broadly interested in the history of medicine in the early modern world as reflected through literature.

Before joining the MPIWG, he worked as a clinical researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. His healthcare background informs his historical approach by shaping the questions he asks about the body and its expressions across time and place, highlighting connections that can illuminate the experience of contemporary illnesses and their cultural dimensions. His past projects, for example, have included studies of  somatic symptom disorders alongside the early modern glass delusion in Europe and pica alongside recipes for stone-based alchemical elixirs from late imperial China.

He holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and an AB in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.