Dr Jimmy Li

Dr Jimmy Xuekai Li is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering. He attended China University of Petroleum, where he received a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering in 2007. He then joined Halliburton Energy Service Company and worked in various technical and management roles in the formation evaluation and directional drilling department. After ten years working in the oil and gas industry (2007-2017), he came to Curtin University (Western Australia) to pursue a higher degree by research and completed his PhD degree in formation evaluation and geophysics in 2021. His PhD thesis resulted in the new theory of wettability-affected wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous media, from which the experimental method was developed to explore rock wettability by using elastic wave measurement. This research has laid a solid theoretical and experimental foundation for the development of multiple-frequency sonic logging tools for measuring formation wettability.

After joining UQ in 2021, Dr Li's research focused on the field of theoretical and experimental study in rock mechanics and geotechnical for underground mining and drilling engineering. In 2022, he assisted to establish the quality management system (QMS) for the Mechanical Testing Laboratory which was granted NATA accreditation on the rock mechanics measurement.

He has a broad interest in geotechnical engineering with special expertise in machine learning, computer vision applications and numerical modelling of geomechanics and underground excavation stability analysis. He also has strong laboratory experience in rock physics, rock strength, wettability and weathering studies.