Member, Royal Society of Canada (RSC) College of New Scholars; Associate Dean, Professional Graduate Programs; Associate Professor, Faculty of Management; Principal’s Research Chair (Tier 2) in Social Innovation for Health Equity and Food Security
University of British Columbia – Okanagan
Dr. Eric Li joined the Faculty of Management at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan campus in 2011. His Ph.D. in Marketing is from York University, and he received his M.A. in Anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dr. Li’s research interests include social enterprise and social innovation, not-for-profit marketing, sustainable marketing and consumption, multicultural marketing and consumption, consumer well-being, health promotion, consumer privacy, food economy and market system, fashion and popular culture, and digital marketing and social media marketing.
His work has been published and presented in a number of academic journals and conferences such as the Association for Consumer Research, the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Management Conference, and the Consumer Culture Theory Conference. Eric also served as a reviewer in many academic journals and conferences such as Journal of Business Research, Human Relations, Consumption Markets and Culture, Marketing Letters, International Marketing Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Canadian Journal of Administrative Science, and Journal of Interactive Advertising as well as at the Association for Consumer Research, American Marketing Association, Consumer Culture Theory, and Global Marketing conferences. In 2013, he served as the track-chair of the China Marketing International Conference. In 2017, Dr. Li started serving on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences. From 2021 to 2023, Dr. Li served as the co-chair of the Film Festival of the Association for Consumer Research Annual Conference.
In 2016, Dr. Li received $64,484 from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council’s Insight Development Grant (IDG) to support his research project “Engaging Stakeholders in Co-Creating a Sustainable Community: A Study of Rural Communities in B.C. Interior.” Dr. Li also received funding from the Mitacs Accelerate Program to support six graduate student internships in the past four years. In 2018, Dr. Li has received another Social Science and Humanities Research Council funding ($21,325) through the Partnership Engage Grant program to support his new initiative, Smart Donate that addresses food insecurity in communities. Dr. Li also received funding from the Mitacs Accelerate Program to support one post-doc fellow and six graduate student internships in the past six years. In addition to these research programs, Dr. Li is also part of a number of multi-disciplinary research projects supported by the tri-council agencies (Canadian Institute of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) and other funding agencies nationally and internationally.
Dr. Li teaches Qualitative Methods in Management Research (graduate-level), Digital Marketing and Consumption (graduate-level), Marketing Strategy (undergraduate-level), Marketing Research (undergraduate-level), and Introduction to Marketing (undergraduate-level) at the University of British Columbia. He also developed directed studies courses on fashion advertising, fashion, design, and culture with senior marketing students in the past years. He was on the University of British Columbia – Okanagan’s Teaching Honour Roll in the 2012-2013 academic year. He was a member of the Scholarships and Awards Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies between 2015 and 2017. He is also been one of the faculty advisors for the campus-wide co-op program at the UBC’s Okanagan campus since 2018. Dr. Li is currently a member of Blockchain@UBC – a collaborative research cluster focusing on Blockchain Technology, the associate member of UBC’s Institute for Healthy Living and Chronic Disease Prevention, the member of the Nature Gas Futures cluster under the UBC Clean Energy Research Centre, and the faculty associate at the York Centre for Asian Research. In 2018, Dr. Li was named the Top 40 Under 40 in Kelowna. He also received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee’s Local Recognition of Outstanding Service Award from the Member of Parliament (Kelowna-Lake Country) in 2022. In 2021, Dr. Li received the Researcher of the Year Award (Social Sciences and Humanities) at the UBC Okanagan campus. In 2022, Dr. Li has been named a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists from the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).
In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Li also serves as the regular board member of the Behavioural Research Ethics Board of UBC’s Okanagan campus and the Scholarships and Awards Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies since 2015. He is also one of the faculty advisors for the campus-wide co-op program at UBC’s Okanagan campus. Dr. Li is currently a member of Blockchain@UBC – a collaborative research cluster focusing on Blockchain Technology, the associate member of UBC’s Institute for Healthy Living and Chronic Disease Prevention, and the faculty associate at the York Centre for Asian Research. Dr. Li is currently the Program Director of the Dual Degree Master of Management program at UBC Okanagan.
CLISA is the first multi-institutional training program in Canada towards climate smart agriculture to help address the need for HQPs who possess appropriate knowledge and expertise in climate change, precision agriculture, water and soil management, sustainable food production and food value chains, and climate-smart financing and policies to promote the development and application of innovative technologies and strategies in Canadian farming practices.
