Dr Jiaying Li

Dr Jiaying Li is a Research Fellow (Lecturer) at the School of Civil Engineering, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney (USYD). She received her PhD in Environmental Engineering from Advanced Water Management Centre (AWMC, now ACWEB) at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia in 2020. After PhD, she became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Fellow at Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS, formerly Entox) at UQ, Australia. She joined USYD as a Sydney Horizon Fellow in 2024. She maintains her close research collaborations with UQ through an adjunct position at QAEHS.

Jiaying is a leading early career researcher in wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), focusing on contaminants of emerging concerns (CECs), integrated urban water systems, and wastewater surveillance for public health and wellbeing. Her monitoring scope includes drugs, pharmaceuticals, CECs, health-related biomarkers, and viral pathogens as well as their source tracking based at urban sewer networks. Her multidisciplinary expertise and skills spans wastewater engineering, biotransformation processes, analytical chemistry, microbiology, geographic information systems (GIS), intelligent modelling, and multivariable data analysis.