ChuanLi Jiang took her first ocean investigation trip "Sino-Japanese Sub-Tropical Circulation Joint Program" in 1996 when she was an undergraduate at the Ocean University of China. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Physical Oceanography in 1998. She then continued her education at the School of Oceanography, University of Washington and obtained her doctoral degree in 2008. Her thesis focused on the upper-ocean heat and momentum budget in the tropical Pacific to understand the ocean's role in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. She also produced a hybrid satellite- and NWP-based turbulent heat flux product to improve the accuracy of the heat fluxes across the ocean-atmosphere interface.

She continued her professional training at Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 2008 to 2011 and extended her research interests from the tropics to the Southern Ocean. She studied the ocean-atmosphere interactions across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current frontal region in the Drake Passage. She joined the Earth & Space Research as a research scientist in July 2011.