Jian Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY). He does teaching and research in support of the Data Science Program, jointly offered by the two departments. He is also a core faculty member of the AI Innovation Institute (AI3) and affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS). Previously, he was an assistant professor at SUNY-Binghamton, and a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, hosted by Prof. Don Towsley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Srinivas Shakkottai. He also worked very closely with Prof. Vijay Subramanian from University of Michigan. He received his B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012. Dr. Li is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2024) and NSF CISE CRII Award (2021). His research has been recognized with several awards, including the ACM/IEEE SC'24 Best Student Paper Finalist, the ACM e-Energy'21 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and the IEEE MASCOTS'18 Best Paper Runner-Up Award. His research has been supported by NSF, ARO, NIH and DOE.
Theory: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, Federated/Decentralized Learning, Stochastic Optimization and Control, RL with Human Feedback (RLHF) and Alignment for Large Language Models (LLMs), RL for LLM Reasoning and Agentic AI
Systems and Security: Large-Scale Networked and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems including LLMs, smart health, wireless networks, edge and cloud computing, caching and content delivery, serverless computing and Internet-of-Things
05/2026: I have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, effective September 1, 2026!