Dan Li

Dan Li is the current Urban-H Associate Director of Heat, joining our Urban-H team on July 1, 2024. In this capacity, he will be at the forefront of the IOC, spearheading the development of innovative solutions to urban heat challenges and our center’s ongoing efforts to work on policy-oriented solutions to mitigate urban heat as a part of our Urban-H Index research initiative.  

Li has received two Early Stage Urban Research Awards from the IOC. His first, in 2018, involved creating a modeling tool that quantified the city-scale impacts of heat mitigation efforts to inform municipal policy design; his second, in 2023, utilized hyper-resolution large-eddy simulations, an innovative modeling program, to evaluate heat mitigation in an urban canopy in Chelsea, MA, with realistic weather conditions.

Li received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University. He currently oversees the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Group in the Department of Earth and Environment, which analyzes interactions between the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, utilizing research tools to address environmental challenges, including climate change and urbanization.