Dr Chunli Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Healthy Air Technology Ltd (HATL), an Oxford-founded company that designs air purifiers combining HEPA-13 filtration with patented D-Orbital Nano Oxide (DNO) catalyst technology. HATL now sells in six countries through partnerships and manufacturing collaborations.
Chunli is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer, a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE, elected 2015) and a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE, elected 2025). She holds a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from the University of Surrey, where she carried out her research on air pollution in the Environmental Flow (EnFlo) Laboratory.
She has held senior roles at Alstom Power, working on steam turbine performance, and at the Building Research Establishment (BRE), working on indoor and outdoor air pollution, thermal comfort and energy efficiency. She also worked on BREEAM in Asia, helping to expand sustainable building practice in China and the wider region.
In 2018 she co-founded HATL with Dr Xiao Tiancun of the University of Oxford, inventor of the DNO catalyst, to bring the technology into everyday air purification. As CEO she also reviews the test evidence HATL publishes on its Evidence & Test Results page.