Benjamin James Li
As a doctoral student in the HEAT Laboratory (PI: Guanyu Su) at UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, Ben researches heat and mass transfer for new fission and fusion reactors to help tackle the clean power and energy security problems of today’s world. He is also a guest student researcher at Argonne National Laboratory working on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for multiphase nuclear systems on exascale supercomputers such as Aurora.
Previously Ben was a staff software engineer at Square (2016-2023), where he joined as a new grad hire and left as tech lead of OS architecture for Android hardware products. Ben got his bachelor’s from Harvard College in Mathematics and Statistics (joint concentration) and his master’s from Harvard SEAS in Engineering Sciences, both in 2016.
Publications
- Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu (2025, Aug 31-Sep 5). miscibleSpeciesTransport: A New OpenFOAM-based Framework for Studying Interphase Tritium Transfer in Molten Salt Systems [Manuscript accepted]. 21st International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics, Busan, South Korea. https://www.nureth-21.org/
- Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu (2025, Jun 16-18). Comparison of Interfacial Mass Transfer Theories for Modeling Interphase Tritium Transfer between Molten Salt and Argon [Conference presentation]. American Nuclear Society Annual Conference 2025, Chicago, IL, United States. https://www.ans.org/meetings/ac2025/
- Li, Benjamin J., Walsh, Beau (2024, Dec 2). The HEAT (High-temperature Energy system and Advanced Technology) Laboratory [Conference poster]. Advanced Fuels Campaign FY24 Annual Review Meeting, Berkeley, CA, United States. https://nuclearfuel.inl.gov/
- Li, Benjamin J. (2016). Random Projection Ensembles and Extensions [Undergraduate honors thesis, Harvard University]. Harvard University Department of Mathematics. https://www.math.harvard.edu/undergraduate/online-senior-thesis/