Hua-bai Li was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1974. He received the Ph.D. degree in astrophysics from Northwestern University in 2006. Afterwards, he worked in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. In August 2013, he started his professorship in the Department of Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research group studies how magnetic fields and turbulence regulate star formation; they use various novel methods in observations, numerical simulations and instrumentation.