Li Li (scientist)

Li Li is an American water scientist. She is the Barry and Shirley Isett professor in Civil and Environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.
==Education==
Li received a Bachelor's and Master’s degree in Environmental Chemistry from Nanjing University in China in 1996 and 1999 and a PhD degree in Environmental Engineering and Water Resources from Princeton University in 2005. She worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoc and as a research scientist before joining faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 2009. 
==Career==
Li's research is focused on uncovering the earth surface and subsurface processes hidden in water and water quality data and using those insights to project future conditions.
 Li's research laboratory group asks questions at the intersection of hydrology, biogeochemistry, and ecology, particularly on how climate change and human disturbance (e.g., urbanization, agriculture) change the structure and functioning of the Critical Zone and shape river water quantity and quality. Her group has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on water and water quality.</ref>
==Research==
Li Reactive Water group has developed and used big data, process-based reactive transport modeling (BioRT-Flux-PIHM 
 and BioRT-HBV), and machine learning tools to understand temporal trends, spatial patterns, and processes that drive water quantity and quality from individual watersheds to continental scale. 
At the watershed scale, her group have provided insights on how subsurface shallow and deep flow paths and source water chemistry influence patterns of river chemistry under the paradigm of the "Shallow and Deep Hypothesis". Li's group has also helped understand how climate regulates the long-term, baseline concentrations of river chemistry across gradients of climate, geology, and vegetation. 
At the continental scale, Li's group has used deep learning approaches (long short-term memory, LSTM) to reconstruct historical water quality data (e.g., water temperature and dissolved oxygen) using the more available weather (hydrometeorology data) and watershed characteristic data. Studies from her group have identified temperature as the predominant driver (compared to other influential factors including light and flow)) for daily dissolved oxygen in US rivers. Their work also revealed unexpected, widespread oxygen loss in warming rivers in the U.S. and in Central Europe. 
===Scientific Collaboration and Outreach===
The Li Reactive Water group has a history of generating teaching videos for the broader community. As an example, the group has generated online teaching materials PNG 550 / CE 574 (Reactive Transport in Porous Media) since 2015. According to website access analysis, this teaching website has been accessed for > 63,000 times by > 41,000 users from > 20 countries across the globe. Her group has recently generated new videos to teach the use of the new watershed-scale reactive transport models, BioRT-HBV.
Li collaborates broadly with biogeochemists, hydrologists, ecologists, and geologists and advocates for women in science. She is a co-host for the international seminar series Women Advancing River Research (WARR), alongside Dr. Ellen Wohl from 2021 to 2022 and Dr. Rebecca Barnes starting in 2023.
==Selected Publications==
*Li, L. et al. Toward catchment hydro-biogeochemical theories. WIREs Water, e1495 (2021). https://doi.org:10.1002/wat2.1495
*Li, L. et al. Expanding the role of reactive transport models in critical zone processes. Earth-Sci. Rev. (2017). 
*Zhi, W. et al. BioRT-Flux-PIHM v1. 0: a biogeochemical reactive transport model at the watershed scale. Geoscientific Model (2022). 
*Bao, C., Li, L., Shi, Y. & Duffy, C. Understanding watershed hydrogeochemistry: 1. Development of RT‐Flux‐PIHM. Water Resour. Res. (2017). 
*Stewart, B. et al. Soil controls short‐term variation but climate regulates long‐term mean of riverine inorganic carbon. Global Biogeochem. Cycles 36 (2022). https://doi.org:10.1029/2022gb007351
*Zhi, W., Klinger, C., Liu, J. & Li, L. Widespread deoxygenation in warming rivers. Nature Climate Change (2023). https://doi.org:10.1038/s41558-023-01793-3
Category:American people
Category:Nanjing University alumni
Category:Princeton University alumni
Category:Scientists