Dr. Tao Li is a Senior Scientist and Environment/Crop Modeler at the International Rice Research Institute, with over 30 years of experience in ecosystem management and modelling.

Dr. Li has a Ph.D. in soil science from the University of Alberta, Canada, and an M.Sc. in ecological agriculture from Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands. He specializes in process-based crop, soil, and climate models, big-data analytics, and machine learning for sustainable rice, crops, and forest systems. He has led the development of the ORYZA rice model and associated tools, contributed to national greenhouse gas inventories, and created integrated modelling platforms for agricultural and forest carbon, productivity, and risk assessment.

Dr. Li has managed multi-country research projects, supervised graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and collaborated widely with public and private partners. His work supports climate-smart agronomy, greenhouse gas mitigation, and precision crop management from field to global scales. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles with over 12,000 citations and an H-index of 45.