Dr Li is a Professor at Central Michigan U. in the US, where he was the former chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. His previous position was at U. of Miami. He specializes in Geographic Information Science with research and teaching experiences in Spatial Statistics, Geographic Information Services, and Cartography. His recent journal publications and presentations focus on information redundancy in big data, visualization of spatial structures, and regression modeling with large spatial data sets. He authored three books on spatial statistics, and edited several books in GIScience. He serves on editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Annals of AAG and Geospatial Information Science.