Ruolin Li leads the Societally-aware Interactive Autonomous Systems (SIAS) Lab at USC. Her research asks how intelligent agents can make better decisions together—and how collective goals can guide their individual actions. Combining game theory, control, optimization, and learning, she studies the interactions among autonomous vehicles, people, and shared infrastructure, with applications to mobility and community resilience.
She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2023 and her M.S. in 2018, and was a CARS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Automotive Research before joining USC.
Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Oliveri Sustainable Prosperity Fund. She leads EVAC-AI, a $2 million NSF FIRE-WUI project (2026–2030) investigating how agentic AI and multi-agent decision support can help communities coordinate wildfire evacuation. Alongside this work, her group studies how routing, incentives, and fleet decisions shape the performance of transportation networks.
Her doctoral work was a finalist for the 2024 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Best Dissertation Award. More recently, the student-led MAPLE paper received the Western Track Best Paper Award at the 8th Bridging Transportation Researchers Conference, connecting network-level traffic objectives with vehicle-level incentives. Her earlier recognition includes selection for the Rising Stars programs in Civil and Environmental Engineering by MIT and in Mechanical Engineering by Stanford, as well as scholarships from the WTS Foundation and the International Society of Automation.