Dr Qilei Song is a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Imperial College London. Dr Song received Bachelor's degree in School of Energy and Environment at Southeast University (Nanjing) in 2006. Afterwards, he stayed working with Prof. Rui Xiao on clean energy, catalysis, and combustion technology, and obtained Master’s degree in Energy & Environmental Engineering in 2009. In October 2009, he joined the Combustion Group led by Prof. John Dennis in the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Cambridge as a postgraduate student working on nanostructured materials for energy applications. In October 2010, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory and completed a PhD in Physics working on microporous polymer membranes with Dr. Easan Sivaniah, and in collaboration with Prof. Eugene Terentjev at the Cavendish Laboratory and Prof. Anthony K. Cheetham FRS in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. He passed his PhD viva in February 2014, and continued as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cavendish Laboratory. 

He joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London in November 2014 to pursue an independent research programme as an Imperial College Junior Research Fellow, and in collaboration with Prof. Andrew Livingston FREng. Dr Qilei Song was appointed a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering in August 2016. He is one of the principal investigators at the Barrer Centre, a new research centre recently launched at Imperial College performing world leading research in separation materials and membrane technology. He is a visiting researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge University, and a visiting researcher at Southeast University (Nanjing, China). 

His current research interests are focused on molecular design of functional porous materials and membranes for energy, environment, and sustainability. He has authored and co-authored about 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Energy, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, and Energy and Environmental Science.