Assistant Professor Ling Li has been named a recipient of the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, a total of $45,000. This award recognizes outstanding new faculty who excel in research, experience, and academic leadership. 

Li's research is motivated by a quest for novel structural materials that are strong, lightweight, sustainable and multifunctional. Such combinations are often found in biological materials, despite the fact that they are made with limited constituent materials with usually poor intrinsic mechanical properties. Li seeks to discover the fundamental formation-structure-property relationships in biological materials and ultimately develop bio-inspired multifunctional structural materials.

His current research efforts focus on quantitative multiscale 3D structural analysis, 4D (3D + time) mechanical and formation analysis, multifunctional biological materials, and design and manufacturing of bio-inspired multifunctional structural materials.