Mai is the inaugural director of Eleos Justice and her academic focus is on the death penalty. She is a social scientist by training and has led and worked on projects on the death penalty in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Her monograph The Death Penalty in Japan: Will the Public Tolerate Abolition? (Springer, 2014), and her documentary film which captured a social experiment exploring what the death penalty meant to ordinary Japanese citizens, influenced the decision by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations to become an abolitionist organisation in 2016.