Emory’s Zhongyu Li Earns 2026 PhRMA Foundation Research Award

Zhongyu Li, of Emory University and The Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, was recently selected as a recipient of the 2026 Value Assessment and Health Outcomes Research Award from the PhRMA Foundation. As part of this highly competitive program, nine early-career researchers were awarded a combined $520,000 in fellowships and grants to advance innovative research in health outcomes and value assessment.

Li received the fellowship for her project, Type 2 Diabetes Subtypes for Precision Medicine in Electronic Health Records — Cancer (T2D-SPEAR Cancer), which explores how distinct subtypes of type 2 diabetes can inform more precise, data-driven approaches to care.

Li’s research focuses on precision medicine in type 2 diabetes, with an emphasis on understanding how heterogeneity in diabetes relates to long-term complications such as cancer.

“I use electronic health records, genomic data and implementation research to study how risk can be better characterized and translated into more personalized prevention and care,” Li said.

Type 2 diabetes is often treated as a single condition, but patients may have very different underlying metabolic profiles. Li’s project, T2D-SPEAR Cancer, examines how clinically identifiable diabetes subtypes relate to site-specific cancer risk by integrating electronic health records, genomic data and clinician perspectives.

“The goal is to support more precise risk assessment and future strategies for complication prevention for people living with type 2 diabetes,” Li said.

Although the study is still ongoing, Li said preliminary findings suggest that type 2 diabetes is not a uniform risk state for cancer, and a one-size-fits-all approach may miss important differences in prevention needs.

“The broader takeaway is that accounting for heterogeneity in type 2 diabetes may improve risk assessment, guide more targeted cancer prevention and help move precision medicine closer to routine care,” Li said.

As an early-career investigator, Li said she hopes to contribute to a “more precise and actionable understanding” of type 2 diabetes.

“Rather than treating type 2 diabetes as a single condition, I want to help identify meaningful patient subgroups with different risk profiles so that prevention, screening and care can be better tailored in ways that are clinically useful and scalable,” she said.