The second research area involves promoting smoking cessation to the youth, helping smokers with chronic diseases, such as cancer and diabetic patients, quit smoking. Dr Li had been leading the smoking cessation team at the School of Nursing since 2012. His major roles are to supervise and monitor the performance of team members, and provide supervision and guidance for the team members on research methodology, report and academic paper writing, and grant application for research projects.

Dr Li conducted the 1st RCT to help smokers who attended emergency departments to quit smoking. Dr Li’s research involves testing the effectiveness of various smoking cessation interventions, which generates new knowledge and evidence and have the greatest potential to effectively implement routinely in clinical and community settings, thus have major clinical and public health implications. Most importantly, the results provide support for the development of clinical practice guidelines, motivate more healthcare professionals and other caregivers, such as the family members of smokers, to routinely promote smoking cessation to smokers in clinical and community settings, and prompt more researchers to design and evaluate other brief smoking cessation programmes.

He has published articles as the first author about the largest trial that addressed an important, but underexplored health issue related to cancer and its treatment on the fatigue and quality of life of childhood cancer survivors in International Journal of Nursing Studies, the first and largest trial conducted to evaluate a smoking cessation intervention to help cancer patients quit smoking in Scientific Reports and first clinical trial to evaluate our developed brief self-determination theory-based smoking cessation intervention to help smokers attending emergency departments in JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr Li has also published an article to provide evidence that highlights the potential for music‐based rehabilitation treatments to alleviate the psychological sequela for these pediatric brain tumor survivors in Psycho-Oncology as the corresponding author.

Dr Li is actively collaborating with local and international renowned scholars to conduct research, teaching, and knowledge exchange. Up to 2020, Dr Li, as the Principal Investigator, has obtained eight external peer-reviewed competitive research grants (6 HMRF and 2 HCPF) and more than 40 grants from both external and internal funding sources. Additionally, Dr Li has published more than 110 peer reviewed international journal articles with high impact factors and most of these publications are in the upper 1/3 of the nursing and health-related categories of the Journal Citation Reports in ISI Web of Knowledge, 10 book chapters and over 140 international conference papers.