shitianl.github.io

Source for my personal academic website, published at shitianl.github.io.

I am a PhD candidate in Biological Sciences at UC San Diego, working in Diana Hargreaves' lab at the Salk Institute. My research looks at how chromatin regulation — particularly the SWI/SNF complex — shapes tumor immunity and responses to cancer immunotherapy.

How the site is built

The site is a single page generated from R Markdown using the postcards package (trestles template).

Path	Purpose
index.Rmd	Source of truth — all page content lives here
index.html	Rendered output, committed so GitHub Pages can serve it
profile.png	Portrait used by the template
.nojekyll	Tells GitHub Pages to serve the HTML as-is
ShitianLi.Rproj	RStudio project file

index.html is self-contained: postcards inlines the CSS and JavaScript, which is why the file is large. Do not edit it by hand — it is overwritten on every render.

Building locally

install.packages(c("rmarkdown", "postcards"))
rmarkdown::render("index.Rmd")

Or click Knit in RStudio with ShitianLi.Rproj open.

Deploying

GitHub Pages serves the main branch from the repository root, so deploying is just committing the re-rendered output:

git add index.Rmd index.html
git commit -m "Update site content"
git push

Changes appear at the live URL within a minute or so. A .nojekyll file tells Pages to serve index.html as-is rather than running it through Jekyll.

License

Site content (text, publication list, portrait) © Shitian Li. The build configuration may be reused freely.