She is a professor of statistics and of computer science at Pennsylvania State University.
[1] Li studied information and control engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1993.
She went to Stanford University for graduate study, earning master's degrees in electrical engineering and statistics in 1995 and 1998 respectively, and completing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1999.
[1] Her dissertation, Image Classification and Compression Based on a Two-Dimensional Multiresolution Hidden Markov Model, was supervised by Robert M.
She worked at the National Science Foundation as a program director from 2011 to 2013, and has been editor-in-chief of the journal Statistical Analysis and Data Mining from 2018 to 2020.