Lixi was educated at Beijing Institute of Aeronautics (now BUAA or Beihang Univ.) and University of Cambridge. His BEng and MPhil degrees from BUAA were in the field of aerospace engineering (jet propulsion), while the topic of his PhD study at Cambridge was theoretical acoustics and respiratory biomechanics. He spent 8 years each in Beijing and Cambridge before coming to Hong Kong in 1996. After completing his PhD work in 1991, he worked as a research associate at the Whittle Lab (of turbomachinery), then as a college research fellow at Peterhouse, both within the University of Cambridge. His work on the mechanism of human snoring helped his medical/surgical colleagues devise a successful laser surgery procedure in the early 1990s, and the related pursuit in fluid mechanics touched upon the fundamentals of fluid-structure energy transfer mechanisms. Before joining the University of Hong Kong in 2006, he taught at HK PolyU Mechanical Engineering and served as a leader for the teaching group of acoustics and vibration. In the last decade or so he has been working in industrial and environmental noise control with a special focus on the use of electromagnetic forces in acoustics. His research projects have been funded by the Hong Kong Government funding agencies (RGC, ITF), industry, and mainland sources (“973” projects, and Department of Science and Technology, Zhejiang Province, PRC).

His current research interests are (a) aerodynamics and acoustics with application to aeronautical and general engineering, (b) innovative broadband noise control with applications to environmental noise, and (c) flow induced vibration and interaction with sound.

He currently serves as a subject editor for Journal of Sound and Vibration, an associate editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and an editorial board member for Chinese Journal of Acoustics.