Baochun Li has made pioneering and sustained contributions to computer networking and distributed systems, ranging from the theory and practice of network coding to cloud security and federated learning. He is widely respected for taking the mathematical rigor of theoretical underpinnings to design and build real-world systems of practical relevance.  His pioneering work on both theoretical advances and practical designs of network coding has led to the UUSee live streaming system in 2009, the world’s first large-scale deployment of network coding in commercial live streaming systems. His seminal work in 2014 studied the practical security challenge of sharing data over the cloud, which has become a daily routine with the prevalence of shared cloud storage services. More recently, he has made seminal contributions towards improving the performance of distributed machine learning systems and federated learning. Since 2015, he has played leadership roles towards automating review assignments in IEEE INFOCOM.  His research impact has led to the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award (2000), the IEEE Communications Society Multimedia Communications Best Paper Award (2009), as well as the Best Paper Award in IEEE INFOCOM 2023. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and IEEE.