Dr. Liming Li is an Associate Research Scientist majoring in Geotechnical, Geo-environmental and Earthquake Engineering, and is the Manager of Centrifuge Research Center/ Carleton Laboratory of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University.  He obtained his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University, China, and his master's and doctoral degrees from Osaka City University.  After completing his doctoral research on earth pressure and deformation of buried flexible pipes through centrifuge modeling, he joined Kiso-Jiban Consultants Co., Ltd. and then Nippon Koei Co., Ltd. as a consulting engineer, and was doing research projects and consulting service in the fields of geotechnical, geo-environmental and earthquake engineering for 11 years in Japan.  Together with his thesis research in Osaka City University, Dr. Li has basically 15 years of practical experience in laboratory testing, centrifuge modeling techniques.  He joined Columbia University in 2007.

Dr. Li’s major research interests are static and dynamic soil-structure interaction problems such as behavior of underground structures, stability of structure foundations and performance of slope protection works.  Recently, he is also doing researches on geo-environmental and earthquake engineering such as rainfall induced ground surface erosion, impact of earthquake to the earth structures and risk evaluation and so on.  He has also developed several earthquake protection technologies to mitigate the earthquake damage of underground structures collaborated with public research institutions in Japan.

Dr. Li is a member of Japanese Geotechnical Society, Japanese Society of Civil Engineering, and also a voting member of technical committee D18 Soil and Rock.  He serves as a paper reviewer for several professional journals and international conferences.