Associate Professor
College of Engineering | Department of Mechanical Engineering
Hometown: Jiaozuo City, Henan Providence, China
Dr. Li joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2022 as an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. From 2015 to 2022, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut and was promoted to Associate Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Northwestern University, focusing on the multiscale modeling of soft matter and related biomedical applications. His current research interests are: multiscale modeling, computational materials design, mechanics and physics of polymers, and machine learning-accelerated polymer design. Dr. Li’s achievements in research have been widely recognized by fellowships and awards, including ACS Polymeric Material Science and Engineering (PMSE) Young Investigator Award (2023), NSF CAREER Award (2021), Air Force’s Young Investigator Award (2020), 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2020), and multiple best paper awards from major conferences. He has authored and co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, including Nature Energy, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, etc.
A speaker fee applies.
Areas of expertise continued: machine learning-accelerated polymer design
Talks:
Machine Learning-accelerated Molecular Design of Innovative Polymers: Shifting from Thomas Edison to Iron Man
Polymeric materials are vital in engineering applications, but their design relies on costly, slow, trial-and-error methods. To overcome this, we develop a data-driven molecular simulation strategy using machine learning and generative models for efficient polymer discovery. This approach benefits computational materials design and industrial applications across multiple sectors.