is a Professor in Sustainability at the School of Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham (UoB). He is the Director of UoB-Nanjing Universty Joint Centre for Research and Education in Climate, Environment & Health; a Steering Research Committee Member and Lead of Finance for Sustainability of Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action (BISCA). Before joining UoB, he worked at the University of Groningen (RUG). He got a doctoral degree from the University of East Anglia (2018) and a master’s degree from Fudan University (2014).

Yuli is a Global Highly Cited Researcher and the World's Top 2% Scientist (career and single year) since 2020. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an IPCC contributing author for AR6 & 7, a coordinating lead authorship for the 5^th National Climate Change Assessment Report of China, and an ISIE Sustainable Urban System Board member. He is an Editor for journals including Science Bulletin, Sustainable Futures (co-EIC), Scientific Data, etc.

Yuli’s research focuses on accounting for carbon emissions, climate change economics, and sustainable development, with a special focus on developing countries and cities. He has published over 200 papers in high-impact journals, including 40+ in Nature / Science / Cell family journals. His papers have been cited over 24k+ times (H-index 72), and 35 of them are ESI highly cited papers and 20 are hot papers.

Yuli is organizing various educational initiatives on climate change and sustainability. See his homepage at UoB for more details.

Yuli has co-founded an open emission dataset (CEADs) to provide the most up-to-date regional emission and energy data for emerging countries and subnational regions.

Yuli has won a dozen academic prizes including the University of Birmingham Founders' Awards (2023), the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed PhD Students Abroad (2016), and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Green Talents Award (2018). Yuli has been interviewed by renowned media outlets and invited to present his research at international conferences.