LAI Lili is currently associate professor in the Institute of Medical Humanities at Peking University. LAI received her PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She also has a BA in Chinese medicine from the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.
As a social anthropologist of China with additional expertise in the anthropology of knowledge and the anthropology of the body, LAI's research interests focus on body, everyday life, and medical practices. Her recent projects involve Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (collaborating with Dr. Judith Farquhar of The University of Chicago), which is about the development of ethnic medical systems in nationality areas, as a kind of historical anthropology and an ethnography of national cultural production; and an ethnographic study of the practice of assisted reproductive technologies in PKU’s medical center, where she paid particular attention to the subtle ways in which technical expert knowledge is blended in practice with rather superstitious procedures that play with the uncertainty of achieving a pregnancy by any means, scientific or otherwise. LAI is a committee member of the Society for Medical Anthropology of Chinese Anthropological Association, and editorial board member for Cultural Anthropology (USA).