Portrait in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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

2026-present

  • Li, Benjamin J., Yuan, Haomin, Saini, Nadish, Su, Guanyu (2026, Nov 15-18). Single Bubble Direct Numerical Simulation of Interface Mass Transfer in Molten Salts with Level Set Method [Manuscript accepted]. 2026 American Nuclear Society Winter Conference & Expo. https://www.ans.org/meetings/wc2026/
  • Jois, Yaamini, Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu (2026). Evaluation of liquid spray column tritium extractor performance [Conference presentation]. American Nuclear Society Student Conference 2026, College Park, TX, United States. https://www.ans.org/meetings/student2026/
  • Anuskiewicz, Dylan, Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu (2026). Packed bed geometry impacts on turbulent mixing and mass transfer [Conference poster]. American Nuclear Society Student Conference 2026, College Park, TX, United States. https://www.ans.org/meetings/student2026/
  • Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu (2026). An engineering and economic figure of merit for tritium extractors [Conference poster]. American Nuclear Society Student Conference 2026, College Park, TX, United States. https://www.ans.org/meetings/student2026/
  • Li, Benjamin J., Su, Guanyu, Dai, Dezhi, Yuan, Haomin, Saini, Nadish (2026). Toward Efficient Tritium Extraction: High-Fidelity Simulation of Gas-Liquid Contactors in Molten Salts. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 267, 128915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2026.128915

2021-2025

  • 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. NURETH-21 – 21st International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics, Busan, South Korea. https://doi.org/10.979.11955566/63
  • 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/

2016-2020