Quan Li is Distinguished Chair Professor and Director of the Institute of Advanced Materials at Southeast University. He is the Honorary Editor-in-Chief of "Chinese Journal of Liquid Crystals and Displays", the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wiley "Responsive Materials", an Editor of Springer Nature "Light: Science & Applications" etc. He held appointments in USA, Germany, and France. He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, where he was promoted to a youngest Full Professor of Organic Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry in February 1998. He has got royalty from his four patents invented at Kent. In the past ten years, he has edited eight books (2 Wiley-VCH, 2 Wiley and 4 Springer books), and has co-authored 40 chapters including the invited author of the entry entitled “Liquid Crystals” in the prestigious Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia and “Gold Nanorods” for Encyclopedia of Surface and Colloid Science. He is the leading guest editor of Advanced Optical Materials special issue entitled “Light-Responsive Smart Soft Matter Technologies”. In last ten years, Li has been a Principal Investigator and Project Director in awarded federal grants from US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, US Air Force Research Laboratory, US Army Research Office, US Department of Energy, US Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US National Science Foundation, etc., and has advised over 20 postdoctoral associates and many Ph.D. students. Li has served as a panelist/reviewer for funding agencies such as US Department of Energy, US Department of Defense, US National Science Foundation, US Air Force of Scientific Research, US Army Research Office, Swiss National Science Foundation, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and MacArthur Fellows Program as well as regular reviewer for book publishers such as Wiley, Wiley-VCH and Springer. He has given more than 100 plenary and keynote talks and seminars and has sat in many conferences’ committees. Li was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany. He has won the Kent State University Outstanding Research and Scholarship award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). He has also been elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and a member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In addition, he has been honored as Professor and Chair Professor at several universities.

His current research interest spans from stimuli-responsive smart soft matter, advanced photonics, and optoelectronic materials for energy harvesting and energy saving to functional biocompatible materials and nanoparticles to nanoengineering and device fabrication.