A physicist's road to stardom

Born in 1962 in Jiangsu province, Li was interested in literature almost as soon as he could read. However, he pursued astrophysics at Peking University and graduated in 1982, believing in the power of science and technology to boost the country's growth.

Li's career as a physicist began to take off while he was working at the prestigious Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and later at universities in the United States, including Brown and the University of Chicago.

In 1999, he returned and worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Li "got his foothold" in his field with a paper published in English in 2004: A Model of Holographic Dark Energy.

In 2013 he moved to Guangzhou to help establish the Institute of Astronomy and Space Science under Sun Yat-sen University, and worked there until last year. He is now based in Shenzhen, as a professor of physics at Southern University of Science and Technology. Quantum gravity, superstring theory and cosmology are some of the weighty topics he follows.

He has also written more than 300 poems, 200 short sci-fi stories and numerous columns, some even on men's fashion. This is not a scientist stuck doing boring lab work.