Yong Li was born in Jilin province, China in 1970. She received her bachelor's degree in education technology in July 1992 at Northeast Normal University and since that time she is working as a teacher in Electrical Engineering faculty at Jilin Engineering Normal University. She received her PhD degree in communication and information system in June 2010 at Jilin University, China. Her PhD thesis focuses on multi-source image fusion based on multi-scale decomposition.

From October 2015 to September 2016, she is a visiting scholar in the Institute of Water-Acoustics, Sonar-Engineering and Signal-Theory (IWSS) at the Hochschule Bremen. She is mainly engaged in the research on recovery problem of compressive sensing signal that is supported by a Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship.