Xiaoye Sherry Li is a researcher in numerical methods at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she works as a senior scientist. She is responsible there for the SuperLU package, a high-performance parallel system for solving sparse systems of linear equations by using their LU decomposition. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she heads the Scalable Solvers Group.
Li graduated from Tsinghua University in 1986, with a bachelor's degree in computer science. She moved to the United States for graduate study, earning a master's degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. Her doctoral dissertation, Sparse Gaussian Elimination on High Performance Computers, was supervised by James Demmel.
In 2016, she was elected as a SIAM Fellow "for advances in the development of fast and scalable sparse matrix algorithms and fostering their use in large-scale scientific and engineering applications". With Piyush Sao and Richard Vuduc she was awarded the 2022 SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize.[1]