Qi received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Columbia University in 2024. His doctoral research involved conducting systematic studies of the electronic and thermodynamic properties of structurally complex deep-earth minerals. He specialized in using ab initio and statistical-mechanics methods, such as density functional theory, density functional perturbation theory, and the quasi-harmonic approximation, and developed custom high-throughput workflows to automate large-scale simulations on supercomputing platforms. He completed his undergraduate studies with a B.Sc. in Physics from Zhejiang University.