Huaicheng Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a 2025 Google Research Scholar. His research focuses on memory and storage systems at the hardware-software boundary, bridging academic innovation and production deployment.

His work addresses challenges central to cloud platforms: CXL memory systems, storage performance predictability, and hardware-software co-design for datacenter efficiency. His current research centers on heterogeneous memory management, from performance modeling and prediction to criticality-aware tiering policies for CXL-based systems. His Pond work (ASPLOS '23 Distinguished Paper) serves as foundational work for Azure's CXL memory VMs, and FEMU (FAST '18), his flash emulator, is the de facto storage research platform with 500+ GitHub stars and adoption by 100+ institutions.

His research has been recognized with a Google Research Scholar Award (2025), NSF CAREER Award (2024), and four best paper awards/nominations at ASPLOS, FAST, and SYSTOR. He publishes at top venues including SOSP, OSDI, ASPLOS, and FAST. He mentors 8 PhD students, including a 2025 Google PhD Fellow.

Prior to Virginia Tech, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago (2020) under Haryadi S. Gunawi and completed a postdoc at CMU's Parallel Data Lab with Gregory Ganger.