Rate My Professor Jianyu Li

Jianyu Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University and holds the position of Canada Research Chair, Tier II. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard University in 2015, where his advisors were Joost Vlassak and Zhigang Suo, and his B.Eng. (Hons) in Polymer Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2010. Prior to joining McGill, he conducted postdoctoral research in bioengineering at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University under the supervision of David Mooney from 2015 to 2017. He began his faculty career at McGill as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor.

Li’s research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the interface between mechanics, chemistry, and biomaterials. His group develops multifunctional soft biomaterials to address challenges in engineering and medicine, including tissue repair, surgical glues, hemostats, and biomedical devices, while also investigating the fundamental mechanical behaviors of soft materials such as adhesion, fracture, fatigue, and stimuli-responsive properties. He is an Associate Member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Surgery at McGill. In 2024, Li received the President’s Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researchers from McGill University. Among his key publications are “Tough adhesives for diverse wet surfaces” in Science (2017), “Controlled tough bioadhesion mediated by ultrasound” in Science (2022), “Programming hydrogel adhesion with engineered polymer network topology” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (2023), and “Designing hydrogels for controlled drug delivery” in Nature Reviews Materials (2016).