Lilian Li, PhD

Lilian Y. Li, PhD, is a principal investigator in the Institute for Mental and Behavioral Health Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Dr. Li received her PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University.

Broadly, Dr. Li's research focuses on understanding how social and affective processes contribute to risk and resilience for psychopathology, with an emphasis on depression. Her work integrates mechanistic neuroscience with scalable digital approaches to examine these processes across laboratory and real-world contexts. She employs advanced data acquisition methods, including EEG hyperscanning and mobile sensing, alongside computational approaches such as EEG time-frequency analysis and natural language processing. A major focus of her research is identifying neural and behavioral markers of short-term vulnerability to depression to inform the development of just-in-time interventions.