Ying is an Assistant Professor in Sports Business and Management. Before joining Birmingham, Ying held a faculty position at the University of Southampton and the University of East Anglia.
Ying's research interests include sport and service marketing, consumer well-being, human-agent interaction, and digital anthropomorphism. Her works have been published in highly regarded journals and conferences, including the Journal of Interactive Marketing and Psychology & Marketing, the American Marketing Association (AMA), the Association for Consumer Research (ACR), and the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) annual conferences.
Ying is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a member of the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network (ECRN). She also serves as a peer reviewer in her field, including the Psychology & Marketing,  European Journal of Marketing, AMA, ACR, EMAC, and the ANZMAC annual conference, etc.

Ying's research interests centre on technopsychology, technology innovation, and consumer well-being. She investigates how digital technology interventions shape consumer behaviour and promote well-being. Ying specialises in digital anthropomorphism, utilising experimental and quantitative methods to address sport and service marketing and social issues in human-agent interactions.

Ying holds a PhD in Digital Technologies from the Institute for Digital Technologies at Loughborough University as a recipient of a full scholarship. She was a visiting PhD student at the Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) lab, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. Her PhD research was rewarded with the "Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad" from the China Scholarship Council (The highest government award granted by the Chinese government to doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers who conduct research and have received doctorates overseas, globally selects 650 young talents from different disciplines every year).

Before earning her Ph.D., Ying received her Master of Research (MRes) Sport Business Degree with Distinction from the Institute for Sport Business at Loughborough University and a BSc Sport Economics and Management Degree at Beijing Sport University.