Li is the PI of a research project in the Systems-Level Decarbonization and Analysis for Fuels and Chemicals research thrust. His research areas include sustainable energy systems design and operation, multi-scale modeling of chemical processes, algorithms and software for optimization under uncertainty, and machine learning for discrete and global optimization. He received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in chemical engineering with a research focus on sustainable energy systems and optimization. Li conducted one year of research as a postdoctoral fellow at Polytechnique Montréal working on machine learning for global optimization.