The Li Innovation Fund Supports Research that Drives Human Progress
Lu Li (MS '15) grew up surrounded by family helping to make the world a better place. Her father was a chemistry professor and her mother was a professor of physics. "Throughout their career, they paid the living costs of the most financially vulnerable students in their courses so that they could continue their education," Li says.
They also asked the college to keep their contributions a secret from the students. Even Li didn't find out until years later. "They wanted students to focus on their studies without a burden of debt or obligation," she says. "They didn't want the students to feel pressured to repay their generosity."
Li has continued her family's tradition of philanthropy with The Li Foundation, a nonprofit she founded last year with her husband and fellow alumnus. Among the foundation's priorities is advancing science and technology, a priority that Li describes as a natural evolution of their experiences while at Caltech.
"We believe that giving back will help fundamental scientific research and tech innovation progress," says Li. "Ultimately this benefits future generations and builds a better planet for the greater good." To that end, the foundation has funded an endowed Li Innovation Fund and a current-use Li Innovation Fund to support research and programs within the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
Exploration as a Path to Caltech
Li's childhood in China was shaped by her parents' openness to her interests. "They didn't push me to take a lot of after school classes," she says. "They let me explore whatever I wanted, whether that was reading books, doing crafts, or learning something interesting like engineering."
Her interest in engineering led her to University of California San Diego as an exchange student in electrical engineering. The quality of her work as a research assistant earned her a PhD fellowship for graduate studies there, but when she was accepted at Caltech, her advisor (a Caltech graduate) encouraged her to go to the Institute instead.
She quickly made the most of Caltech's welcoming environment and access to great minds. In Ken Pickar's entrepreneurship course, she attended a lecture by the late Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, president emeritus and the former Judge Shirley Hufstedler Professor of Biology. Li approached him after his remarks and asked if she could interview him for a Chinese college student magazine where she was a contributing writer. With Pickar's encouragement, she also interviewed Nobel Laureates Robert Grubbs, the former Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry, and Rudy Marcus, the former John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry.
The interviews made a lasting impression.
"I was deeply moved by Professor Pickar's selfless devotion to supporting young students in so many ways," Li says. "I gained an immense amount from his mentorship and encouragement."
Greening the Grid for a More Sustainable Future
Both Li and her husband have developed relationships with faculty that continue to thrive more than a decade after their graduation. It is in fact their connections with former professors—including Adam Wierman, Carl F Braun Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Steven Low, Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering—that helped inspire the Li Innovation Fund.
"Breakthroughs in science and technology are what drives human progress and the evolution of civilization," says Li. Low's and Wierman's research intersect in areas of energy needs, specifically as it relates to a more sustainable electrical grid.
After an early history of innovation more than a century ago, according to Low, the power industry matured when most Americans had access to reliable sources of electricity. Subsequently, investment in research and development slowed. "Starting about 20 years ago, things started to change because of the urgent need to respond to climate change," he says. "Now we need to innovate and deploy new technologies to hasten energy transition. Therefore, we need to bring in new ideas from computer science, applied math, and economics to navigate these new challenges."
A portion of Wierman's research leverages mathematics and economics to identify ways to make networked systems, like the electrical grid, more resilient. The rapid use of LLMs, and the expanding presence of data centers to meet consumer demand, have added a new layer of complexity to this work.
"In the early 2010s, data centers accounted for about one to one and a half percent of US electricity usage. There were fears that it was going to get up to three to five percent," says Wierman. "We are again in an exponential phase of growth, and people are projecting data centers will hit 15 to 20 percent of US electricity usage in a few years."
Yet Wierman also sees opportunities in data centers, leveraging their innate flexibility in when and where they consume energy. "They're highly controlled and smart in the way they do resource allocation. And there is capital to invest in infrastructure improvements to enable centers to move into a community if the infrastructure is able and willing to take that investment and build on it," he says. While a data center can be a problem, it potentially is a big part of the solution, observes Wierman who is partnering with the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science to provide a model framework to better inform data-center deployment decisions.
A Shared Sense of Curiosity
Much like her parents' approach to philanthropy, Li and her husband's creation of both an endowed fund and a current-use fund allows for a variety of ways to meet the research and related programming needs.
"They have given us complete freedom in how we use the funds in our research, which is very much in the spirit of Caltech," says Low.
Looking back at her time at Caltech, Li recalls the magic that happens when creative minds connect. "It is incredibly rewarding to be part of an environment where we unite over a shared curiosity, continuously inspiring and uplifting one another," she says.