Dr. Li’s research focuses on prevention, chronic disease management, and psychosocial factors in obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and smoking with a strong emphasis on disadvantaged populations. She graduated with a Ph.D. in health behavior from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Her dissertation focused on understanding how worksite-based multilevel interventions influence employee’s weight. Throughout her graduate study at UNC, she worked on multiple National Cancer Institute (NCI), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Institutes for Health-funded studies. As well as on interdisciplinary work including the Patient Safety Culture Survey Study at UNC Health Care System, the North Carolina Trimming Risk In Men (TRIM) Project, the Cancer Understanding Today Study (CUTS), the WAY to Health project, and the FITShop project. As a former Los Angeles Area Health Services Research Training Program postdoctoral fellow, she examined the contextual and individual level factors affecting access and health services utilization among Korean Americans and designed a mixed methods study to examine needs and barriers to lung cancer screening among Asian American smokers.
Prior to her doctoral training, Dr. Li earned her M.P.H. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior, she received a bachelor of medicine degree in preventive medicine from Fudan University and worked for Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Shanghai, China.
Dr. Li was a 2016 AcademyHealth Delivery System Science Fellow. Her host site was the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute.