Yanran Li obtained her Bachelor's degrees in Chemistry from Nankai University, and Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University, China, in 2007. From 2008 to 2012, she pursued her PhD degree in Professor Yi Tang's group at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working on elucidating and engineering the biosynthesis of bacterial and fungal aromatic polyketides. She then spent one year in Prof. Rustem Ismagilov's group at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), using microfluidic devices to investigate microbial interactions. From 2013 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Christina Smolke's group at Stanford University, working on the engineered biosynthesis of plant alkaloids in yeast. In 2016, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Riverside, working on harnessing yeast to investigate plant secondary metabolism.