ABOUT ME

Professional Experience

• Director, Materials and Manufacturing Futures Institute 2018 - 
• Professor 2012 -
• Associate Professor, School of Materials Science & Engineering, UNSW 2009-2011
• Senior Lecturer, School of Materials Science & Engineering, UNSW, 2007-2009
• Lecturer, School of Materials Science & Engineering, UNSW 2004-2007
• Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), 1998-2004

My career in research began in an unlikely place: a shipyard.

After completing my Bachelor of Engineering, I started work as an engineer in an environment where precision, reliability and established procedures were essential. It was valuable training, but I soon realised that I was more interested in questioning established approaches than simply following them. I wanted to understand why things behaved the way they did, what conventional thinking might have overlooked, and whether entirely different possibilities could exist.

That curiosity drew me towards research. After completing a Master of Engineering, I began research and teaching as a junior academic. My path, however, was never entirely conventional. I also spent time as a futures broker, an experience that introduced me to markets, risk and quantitative decision-making. Finance and scientific research may appear worlds apart, but both taught me to look for patterns in complex systems, challenge assumptions and make decisions when the answer is far from obvious.

Research ultimately became my path. I completed my PhD at the University of Auckland in 1998, joined Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as an Assistant Professor, and moved to UNSW Sydney in December 2004. In 2025, I was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship, Australia's most prestigious competitive research fellowship.

My scientific journey has been just as unconventional, taking me from quantitative modelling and high-temperature superconductivity to advanced manufacturing, electronic materials, semiconductors and clean energy. Moving across these fields taught me something that has shaped the way I approach research: important discoveries often emerge when ideas normally kept apart are brought together.

Today, my research sits at the intersection of advanced materials, semiconductor science and clean energy. I am interested not simply in improving existing technologies, but in discovering new physical phenomena, materials and mechanisms that challenge established assumptions and open possibilities that were previously thought difficult or impossible.

Rather than treating these areas as separate disciplines, I look for fundamental connections between them. A discovery in materials physics can create a new electronic device. A concept from semiconductor manufacturing can provide an unexpected route to clean energy technologies. A phenomenon first observed at the nanoscale can ultimately change how a technology is designed and manufactured.

The question that drives me is therefore not simply how to make an existing technology better. I want to know what becomes possible when we understand a material or physical phenomenon in a fundamentally new way, and how that discovery can be transformed into a technology that did not exist before.

This approach has led to publications in leading journals, including Nature and Science, patented technologies and extensive industry collaborations. Yet I have never regarded a publication or patent as the end of a discovery. The greater challenge is to understand and control a discovery well enough to translate it from the laboratory into a technology that can be manufactured at scale and make a real difference.

From shipbuilding and quantitative finance to materials physics, semiconductors and clean energy, my career has never followed a straight line. I have come to see that as one of its strengths. Each change of direction has given me a different way of looking at a problem.

The common thread has always been curiosity: questioning what is accepted, seeing connections that are not immediately obvious, discovering what becomes possible when those connections are understood, and turning those discoveries into technologies that can make a difference.

RESEARCH

Research Contribution

Professor Sean Li has made extensive and significant scientific contributions in the field of electroceramics and addressed many problems that challenged the research community for many years. His real-world research has closed the gaps between fundamental scientific research and industry applications to solve real-world problems. He has invented many game-changing technologies that have been licensed and implemented by industry. As an academic with expertise in electronic ceramics, Professor Li has an outstanding and unique publication record within his field. He has published his work in prestigious journals, including Nature, Science, Progress in Materials Science, Energy and Environmental Science, Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, ACS Energy Letters, Coord. Chem. Rev., Adv. Funct. Mater., Adv. Sci., ACS Nano, Nano Energy, JACS, and PRL. Professor Li’s laboratory is equipped with world-class research facilities with the depth and variety of these facilities establishing UNSW as a preeminent facility in the area of fabrication of advanced multifunctional materials.

TEACHING & OUTREACH

Teaching Contributions

Professor Sean Li is currently teaching MAST6001. Since 2007, there have been 70 HDRs including 35 Ph.D., 27 M.Eng. and 8 M.Sc. students who have completed their degrees under Professor Sean Li’s supervision (up to 12^th March 2023). Professor Li's HDR alumni are currently working as academics and scientists in universities or global leading companies in Australia, USA, Japan, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong and China etc.  

AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

AWARDS & MEMBERSHIPS

• 2016  - UNSW - Innovation of the Year Award 
• 2016  - Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia Award - Best Commercial Innovation
• 2013 - Global Star Award, American Ceramic Society 
• 2006 - Vice-Chancellors Teaching and Research Award 
• 2004 - Excellence in Teaching Award 2004, Nanyang Technological University Singapore