Prof. LI Tianyi 李天一

Assistant Professor

Area of Specialization: Turbulence; Artificial intelligence for fluid mechanics; Computational fluid dynamics; Geophysical fluid dynamics

PolyU Scholars Hub

ORCID ID

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Biography

BEng (Tsinghua University); PhD (Peking University)

Short Description

Prof. Li received his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2014 and his PhD from Peking University in 2020. Before joining PolyU, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Southern University of Science and Technology from 2020 to 2022 and at the University of Rome Tor Vergata from 2022 to 2026. His research focuses on turbulence and complex fluid flows, combining high-fidelity numerical simulations with artificial intelligence. He develops data-driven and generative methods for modelling and reconstructing turbulent flows, particularly when observations are sparse or incomplete. His research interests include fundamental turbulence, atmospheric and oceanic flows, and dispersed multiphase flows.

Selected Publications

T. Li, L. Biferale, F. Bonaccorso, M. A. Scarpolini and M. Buzzicotti, “Synthetic Lagrangian turbulence by generative diffusion models,” Nature Machine Intelligence, 6, 393–403 (2024). Featured on the cover of the April 2024 issue.
T. Li, M. Buzzicotti, L. Biferale, F. Bonaccorso, S. Chen and M. Wan, “Multi-scale reconstruction of turbulent rotating flows with proper orthogonal decomposition and generative adversarial networks,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 971, A3 (2023).
T. Li, L. Biferale, F. Bonaccorso, M. Buzzicotti and L. Centurioni, “Stochastic reconstruction of gappy Lagrangian turbulent signals by conditional diffusion models,” Communications Physics, 8, 372 (2025).
T. Li, S. Tommasi, M. Buzzicotti, F. Bonaccorso and L. Biferale, “Generative diffusion models for synthetic trajectories of heavy and light particles in turbulence,” International Journal of Multiphase Flow, 181, 104980 (2024).
T. Li, M. Wan, J. Wang and S. Chen, “Flow structures and kinetic-potential exchange in forced rotating stratified turbulence,” Physical Review Fluids, 5, 014802 (2020).