Siran Li grew up in Beijing, studied mathematics from 2009 to 2013 at Columbia University, New York, and obtained the D.Phil. degree in 2017 from the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Gui-Qiang Chen. He did postdoctoral researches with Bob Hardt from 2017 to 2020 at Rice University, Houston, and spent the year 2018 - 2019 at McGill and Concordia Universities in Montreal as a CRM-ISM postdoctoral fellow. Siran moved back to China in 2020, first working at New York University-Shanghai. He joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an associate professor in September 2021.
Siran's main research interests include analysis of partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, and applied mathematics. One of the main themes of his mathematical work is the analysis of singularities, or structures of weak regularities, which arise naturally from problems in differential geometry and fluid dynamics. His recent research projects concern with isometric immersions of manifolds, the theory of compensated compactness, and the Navier-Stokes equations.