Li is Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean, College of Engineering at City University Hong Kong. He has been at CityU since 2007, following his initial studies and research at Tsinghua University.

His research interests include: Algorithms Design and Analysis, Combinatorial Optimisation, Algorithmic Game Theory and Operations Research.

As well as having published extensively in the field, Li sits on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Journal of Scheduling, the Journal of Combinatorial Optimisation and Omega.