Biography

Li Qian was born in Shanghai, in the midst of China's Cultural Revolution, a tumultuous period during which acquiring knowledge, among many other things, was considered "counter-revolutionary". Students, as well as their teachers, were shut out from their classrooms and sent to the rural areas to plough the land -- to be "re-educated". Fortunately for her, Cultural Revolution ended when she reached school age, and she was among the first generation to receive complete, un-interrupted, primary and secondary education. She recalls, during her first year of school in Beijing, she and other first graders had to carry wooden stools from home to school and back everyday as there were no chairs in the newly formed classrooms.

She spent most of her childhood in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the untamed "wild west" of China, known for its vast Gobi Desert, the stunning Heavenly Lake, and the legendary Silk Road. Her parents, both medical professionals from Shanghai, were sent by the Ministry of Health to help establish a medical college and hospitals in Xinjiang. Her father was one of the founding members of the Xinjiang Medical University.

Out of concern for her education, her parents sent Li back to Shanghai in the 80's to attend better secondary schools. She graduated from the Shanghai No.3 Girl's High School, the successor of two notable missionary schools: the St. Mary's Hall (founded in 1881) and the McTyeire School (founded in 1892), which educated the elite young women of the country in the early 20th century. Their notable alumnae included the Soong Sisters and Eileen Chang.

At sixteen, Li enrolled in Fudan University's Nuclear Physics Department in Shanghai. Before finishing her second year of study, she applied for and was later admitted to the Memorial University of Newfoundland, the only university in Canada she could afford because it charged the lowest tuition fees for international students at the time. She moved to Newfoundland, and changed her major from physics to engineering in order to participate in the engineering co-op program, which allowed her to earn sufficiently to support her education entirely on her own. During this period, she worked for eight months as a co-op student at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Power Station near Saint John, New Brunswick.

In 1991, she transferred to University of Toronto to continue her undergraduate program in Electrical Engineering. She took various part-time tutoring jobs during school terms and worked at GE Canada in Peterborough, Ontario, during the summer months. She graduated with honours in 1993, and continued her post-graduate studies at the University of Toronto. She specialized in photonics, and studied under Prof. Peter W.E. Smith. She conducted the pioneering study on a semiconductor with subpicosecond optical response--InGaAsP grown by helium-plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy--a promising new material for ultrafast optical signal processing, which earned her a Ph.D. degree.

After graduation, she joined Corning Incorporated, a high-tech industry leader in R&D and manufacturing of optical fibers and amplifiers. She and her colleagues developed the first commercial extended L-band erbium-doped fibre amplifiers using phosphosilicate fibers. The amplifiers were sold to Nortel Networks and carried live traffic in their 40G system field trials.

In 2003, she returned to the University of Toronto as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her group conduct experimental research in quantum key distribution, ultrafast and nonlinear optics, fiber-optic sensing, and optical amplifiers. She was the winner of the Premier's Research Excellence Award in Ontario in 2003. She served as a technical committee member for the OSA's Optical Amplifier and Their Applications Conference (2003-2006), the Nonlinear Photonics conference (2007), and the SPIE's Photonics North conference (2005). She also presided as Chair in some of the technical sessions of these conferences. She was elected Senior Member of the IEEE in 2006, and became a Canada Research Chair in November 2006. She was promoted to associate professor rank in 2008.