His research interests are in the areas of audio, speech and language processing as well as multimodal behavior signal analysis and interpretation. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include speech processing, machine learning, math for AI.

He has published more than 200 papers and served as the member of IEEE speech and language technical committee, APSIPA speech and language processing technical committee. He was an area chair at Interspeech 2016, Interspeech 2018, Interspeech 2020, SLT2022, Interspeech 2024, Interspeech 2025, ASRU 2025. He is the technical program co-chair at Odyssey 2022 and ASRU 2023. He is an editorial member of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Computer Speech and Language and APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing. As a co-author, he has won the best paper award in DCOSS2009 and ISCSLP2014 as well as the best paper shortlist in Interspeech 2024. He received the IBM faculty award in 2016, the ISCA Computer Speech and Language 5-years best journal paper award in 2018 and the youth achievement award of outstanding scientific research achievements of Chinese higher education in 2020. 

Ming Li received his Bachelor's degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Nanjing University in 2005, a Master's degree in Signal and Information Processing from the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, USA, in 2013. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he served as an Associate Professor and PhD Advisor at Sun Yat-sen University.