Professor Philip Li Hui is the Assistant Vice President (Regional Outreach) and Chair Professor of Early Childhood Education at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). Prior to his current role, he held leadership positions as Dean of the Shanghai Institute of Early Childhood Education at Shanghai Normal University, Programme Director (Master) at Macquarie University, and Programme Director (MEd) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Professor Li received his PhD in Education from HKU in 2000, following undergraduate and master’s degrees in Early Childhood Education from Beijing Normal University. He began his academic career at the then Hong Kong Institute of Education (now EdUHK), and later returned to HKU before being appointed as a full professor at Macquarie University in 2018. He holds honorary professorships at Macquarie University and Shanghai Normal University and has served as a Visiting Professor at several universities across mainland China.

His research interests span educational neuroscience, developmental psycholinguistics, early literacy and bilingualism, curriculum and pedagogy, educational policy, school leadership, and teacher education. He has supervised 25 doctoral students, six postdoctoral fellows, and one US Fulbright scholar across Hong Kong, Australia, and mainland China.

Professor Li has secured competitive research funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the General Research Fund (with five grants, three as principal investigator and two as co-investigator), the Collaborative Research Fund, the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, and the Quality Education Fund (with six projects funded).

He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal AI, Brain, and Child, published by Springer-Nature. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, ECNU Review of Education, International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, International Journal of Early Years Education, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, and Springer-Nature Social Sciences.

Professor Li’s curriculum innovations, including the SAIL (Oxford, 2004-) and SPA (Oxford, 2012-) learning packages, are widely implemented in Hong Kong kindergartens. His ‘3CAP’ theory has received scholarly attention and application from American researchers (JRCE, Issue 1, 2020). His ‘3A2S’ theory has been extensively utilised by international scholars to critically examine education policies (Li, Park, & Chen, 2017). He has also played a significant role in early childhood education policymaking in Hong Kong and overseas. As of 2025, Professor Li has published 337 research outputs listed on Google Scholar and 222 indexed in Scopus. According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index of 48 and over 8,700 citations. Since 2021, he has been ranked among the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University (top 1% since 2023).