Lina Li is Winokur Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. She is a Scientific Advisor of Singularity Energy, Inc, a startup providing a suite of innovative products, developer APIs, and intelligent tools for companies to build the future of decarbonization solutions, and Elastro Inc, a neurotechnology startup developing next-generation brain-computer interfaces to transform the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders

Li's research lies in control, learning, and optimization of dynamical systems, including theory development, algorithm design, and applications to real-world cyber-physical systems, such as robotics, bio-medical systems, energy systems, buildings, bio-medical systems, etc. Her current research focuses on the interplay between control and learning—such as model-based and model-free reinforcement learning, offline and online learning, diffusion models, scalable multiagent-learning, etc—and their applications to robotics, neuroscience, and emerging directions in agentic and physical AI for science and engineering.