Xiuling Li received her B.S. degree from Peking University and Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles. Following post-doctoral positions at California Institute of Technology and University of Illinois, as well as industry experience at Coherent, Inc. (formerly EpiWorks, Inc.), she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2007. At UIUC, she was the Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering, the interim director of the Nick Holonyak Jr. Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. She joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in Aug. 2021. She currently holds the Truchard Foundation Endowed Chair in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and serves as the founding co-director of the Texas Quantum Institute.
Her research focuses on semiconductor materials and devices. She has published >180 journal papers and holds >25 patents, delivered > 180 invited lectures worldwide. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award, the IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, and the IEEE Photonics Society Engineering Achievement award. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Physics Society (APS), the Optical Society (OSA), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Among her services to professional societies, she was the VP of Finance and Administration and an elected member of the board of governors of IEEE Photonics Society, and the fellow evaluation committee of IEEE Electron Device Society and IEEE Nanotechnology Council, IEEE Andrew Grove award committee chair, and the executive committee of APS Division of Materials Physics. She has been a Deputy Editor of Applied Physics Letters since 2015.