That perspective first led him from mechanical engineering to civil engineering. It later shaped a career spanning materials engineering, municipal engineering, infrastructure and private development. And relatively early in that career, it propelled Li into leadership roles where he has had the opportunity to help shape Utah’s broader engineering community.
Most recently, Li completed his term as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Utah Section, serving in the section’s presidential leadership from 2023 to 2025.
It was a significant responsibility for an engineer still building his own career—and an opportunity Li embraced.
Li began his engineering education in mechanical engineering, earning a bachelor’s degree and studying areas such as HVAC. But the more he learned about building systems, the more interested he became in everything surrounding them.
HVAC was one component of a building. Li wanted to understand how all the pieces came together.
That curiosity—along with the opportunity to continue his passion for snowboarding—brought him to civil engineering at the University of Utah, where he earned his master’s degree in May 2017. Working with Professor Pedro Romero, Li focused his thesis research on concrete shrinkage.
As part of his master’s research, he explored the ways to better understand and prevent concrete shrinkage before it leads to costly repairs. His research examined how environmental conditions and material properties affect long term concrete performance. Through lab testing, he analyzed different concrete shrinkage performance at different humidity levels and specimen sizes. Another case study was to investigate how titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photocatalytic material, absorbs the NOx gases from vehicle exhausts when applying to concrete pavement.
After graduation, he began his career with a small geotechnical engineering company before joining the South Salt Lake Engineering Department.
The municipal environment gave Li exactly the kind of broad exposure that had attracted him to civil engineering. He worked across drainage, roadway, site planning, geotechnical issues, project management, and coordination with consultants while seeing projects progress from planning and engineering through construction. In 2019, he also helped prepare engineering standards and drainage design manual for the city.
The experience taught him to look beyond any single engineering discipline and understand how infrastructure, development, government and the private sector intersect.
While working at South Salt Lake, Li became involved with the ASCE Utah Younger Member Forum, eventually serving as its 2019-2020 president. The role introduced him to a professional community beyond his day-to-day work and gave him opportunities to organize, make connections and serve other engineers.
During his Younger Member Forum presidency, Li attended multiple ASCE conferences and events. There, conversations with national ASCE leaders and section leadership encouraged him to consider taking the next step and becoming more involved at the Utah Section level. That encouragement eventually led Li to the ASCE Utah Section presidency, placing him in a leadership position representing civil engineers from across the state.
The experience was markedly different from leading the Younger Member Forum. At the section level, Li encountered broader questions affecting the profession, including the sometimes competing priorities of public agencies and private industry. Rather than being discouraged by those challenges, he found them rewarding. The position gave him an opportunity to participate in decisions affecting Utah’s engineering community and to serve a profession that had already given him significant opportunities.
It also expanded his perspective beyond Utah. Through ASCE conferences, Li connected with engineering leaders from states including Nevada, Arizona and Alaska, exchanging ideas about how their organizations operate and considering what Utah could learn from them. Supporting collegiate ASCE chapters and strengthening connections with future engineers became another important part of that work.
In June 2022, Li joined Avenue Consultants, where he works as a lead land development engineer. His projects require him to balance numerous parts of the development process, including site planning, drainage, water and sewer connections, infrastructure, structural considerations and coordination with geotechnical engineers. His work ranges from single-family residential developments and subdivisions to commercial developments, parking lots and office projects.
For Li, that variety is part of the appeal. His work requires understanding how different engineering disciplines fit together and how decisions in one area can affect an entire project. It is the larger view of buildings and development that first drew him away from focusing solely on mechanical systems and toward civil engineering.
Whether coordinating disciplines on a development project or bringing together engineers with different professional perspectives through ASCE, Li has built his early career around connecting people, ideas and areas of expertise.
And when he isn’t doing that, there’s a good chance he is looking toward Utah’s mountains.
An avid snowboarder, Li heads to the slopes in search of fresh powder roughly 30 to 40 times a year. It’s a passion that keeps him busy outside of engineering—and makes Utah a particularly good place to call home.