Dr Li is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Geoenvironmental Engineering at Imperial College London and serves as a By-Fellow at Churchill College. His research advances sustainable remediation, resource recovery, and the nanomaterialisation of contaminated soils and waste. He received his D.Phil. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (June 2023) and has held research appointments at Cardiff University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Cambridge.

He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles (18 high-level SCI papers as first or corresponding author), authored a research monograph, and is an inventor on 15 patents spanning the United States, Mainland China, and Hong Kong. He is an active member of ASCE, ISEG, and ISSMGE, and serves on the editorial boards of Environmental Geotechnics and Biogeotechnics. His honours include the ISSMGE Bright Spark Lecture Award (2025) and the Special Prize of the Presidential Scholarship at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2023). As principal investigator, he has secured over €0.55 million in competitive funding.