Professor Li is currently a chair professor joint-appointed by Department of Physics and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. Prior to SUStech, he had been endowed Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Physics at University of Colorado Boulder, USA since 2015-2023, Professor at Department of Physics, National University of Singapore (NUS) (2000-2015).

He has been a pioneer in the research of micro and nano scale heat conduction and the field of Phononics. His group at NUS has invented thermal diode, thermal transistor, thermal logic gates and thermal memory etc. He has published over 400 papers including 3 in Review of Modern Physics, 30 in Phys. Rev. Lett. His works have been cited more than 37,000 and with H-index=101.

He has been an elected member of Academia Europaea, Fellow of American Physical Society, and recipient of numerous awards such as 2005 Singapore National Science Award, 2005 OCPA AAA award, 2014/2015 R S Springer visiting professor at UC Berkeley, 2017 Brillouin Medal from International Phononic Society. He has supervised over 110 Ph.Ds and Postdocs.

Plenary talk: Advancements in Thermal control devices: State of the art and perspectives