Biography

Dr. Jin Li is Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University. Originally from China, she received her B.A. in German from Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages in 1982. She earned her first Ed.M. in education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, her second Ed.M. in Administrative Planning and Social Policy in 1991, and her Ed.D. in human development and psychology from Harvard University in 1997. Dr. Li’s research focuses on East Asian virtue-oriented and Western mind-oriented learning models and how these models shape children’s learning beliefs, parental socialization, and achievement. She has studied children and families from Chinese, Taiwanese, Chinese American, European American, and other cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Her research has been funded by William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. Her research has been published in leading academic journals and presses. She has delivered lectures in a dozen different countries. Her 2012 book Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West synthesizes related research over the past decades and offers new perspectives on the indispensable role of culture in human learning. Dr. Li was one of the inaugural Berggruen Fellows 2015-17, first at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University and later at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, China. The Berggruen Fellowship supported her current book manuscript entitled To be or to become: Philosophical origins and psychological expressions of self in the West and East Asia where she synthesizes philosophy with psychological research to examine how the self is conceptualized and functions in these two cultural systems.