Publication, citation and read counts from his ResearchGate profile.
He has spent his career asking what the past can tell us about the climate we live in now, and finding the answers in stalagmites, lake sediments, peat, tree rings and corals.
Professor Li specializes in geochronological dating (¹⁴C, ²³⁰Th/U and ²¹⁰Pb), stable isotopes and elemental geochemistry. His records of the Holocene and late Pleistocene have helped explain how solar activity, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, ENSO, the Subtropical High and the Siberian High shape monsoon and westerly climates.
At National Taiwan University he led the NTUAMS Lab, where accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating also served archaeological and oceanographic studies. He trained students and worked with colleagues across Taiwan, mainland China, the United States and beyond.
Career
A life, read like a core
Geologists read a sediment core from the bottom up: the oldest layers at the base, the newest at the top. Here is his path from Chengdu to Los Angeles to Taiwan, logged the same way.
Retires from National Taiwan University
After fifteen years on the NTU faculty.
Professor of Geosciences, National Taiwan University
Leads the NTUAMS radiocarbon lab, Taipei.
Associate Professor, then Professor, National Cheng Kung University
Department of Earth Sciences, Tainan.
Postdoctoral Researcher, then Research Assistant Professor, USC
Department of Earth Sciences, Los Angeles.
Ph.D., Geological Sciences
University of Southern California.
M.S., Geochemistry
Graduate Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
B.S., Chemistry and Radiochemistry
Sichuan University.
Research
Clocks, signals and archives
Dating tells you when. Isotopes tell you what the climate was doing. Natural archives hold both.
Geochronology
Radiocarbon, uranium-series and lead-210 dating that put precise ages on sediments, cave deposits and artifacts.
Isotope geochemistry
Stable isotope and trace-element ratios that record rainfall, temperature and water balance through time.
Climate archives
Lake and marine sediment cores, speleothems, peat profiles, tree rings and corals from Taiwan, China and California.
What drives the monsoon
Linking past rainfall to solar activity, ocean oscillations, the Subtropical High and the Siberian High.
Deep time, fine detail
High-resolution records, some year by year, reaching from recent centuries back hundreds of thousands of years.
Archaeology and the ocean
Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating applied to archaeological and oceanographic questions.
NTUAMS LabAccelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon laboratory, National Taiwan UniversityVisit the lab site
Publications
Selected work
A few papers that show the range of his research. His complete record is on the profiles below.
Publication list
| Year | Title and authors | Journal |
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Photography
Through his lens
A field scientist learns to notice light, landforms and small details. These are photographs he has taken for the love of it.
Students and colleagues
The people along the way
Classrooms, field trips, labs and conferences across thirty years. Every face here is part of the story.
Hover over a photo to bring it forward. Click to open it.