Dr. Mengyao Li is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to joining Queen’s in July 2022, Mengyao was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. She obtained her PhD in 2017 from the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a joint BA degree in Psychology and Human Rights from Bard College in 2012.

Mengyao’s research lies at the intersection of social, political, and peace psychology. It broadly focuses on the psychological processes of intergroup conflicts and their resolution, group-based violence, national and ethnic identity, transitional justice, as well as civil resistance and social change. She is particularly interested in contextualizing psychological research and extending it to underrepresented regions and marginalized groups. Her research utilizes multiple methods, such as surveys, experiments, field experiments, archival analyses, and interviews.