Virginia C. Li, Ph. D., is Professor Emerita in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health. She was born in China and came to the United States as a teen. She received her baccalaureate and masters degree in Foods and Nutrition. When she was a mother of three young children, she returned to graduate school and received her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. She has also held professorships at the University of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

In 1974, she returned to China for the first time since the Communist Revolution of 1949 for a five-week study tour on the cooperative medical system and the barefoot doctors. Since that momentous visit, she has gone on to consult on health programs in China under the auspices of the World Heath Organization, United Nations Development Program, UNESCO, and International Development and Research Center, the Ford Foundation, and the World AIDS Foundation. Currently, she and her colleagues at UCLA are pilot-testing a reproductive health website developed to provide information and guidance to health workers, cadres, and teachers in rural villages of Yunnan province.

Virginia Li has also served as honorary professor at the Sun Yat-Sen Medical University, the Guangdong Medical College and Shantou University College of Medicine. She is honorary professor at the Nanjing College for Population Program Management, and the Kunming Medical College.