Welcome. 欢迎。
As associate professor of social policy and development at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), I’m engaged in problem-driven, policy-relevant research and teaching on topics including: NGOs, activism, civil society, public opinion, development, public health, sexuality, and social policy. While widely recognised as a China expert, my work is broadly comparative and international in scope.
Beyond teaching and research, I am co-editor of The China Quarterly, a member of the governing council of the LSE-Fudan Research Centre for Global Public Policy, and on the editorial board of Global Public Policy and Governance. I’m a sought after expert witness in asylum cases in the UK and US, and frequently appear in news media in Europe, North America, and Asia. I am also currently doctoral programme director in the Department of Social Policy at LSE.
While this site is my most comprehensive and frequently updated presence on the web, I also maintain profiles on Google Scholar, LSE Research Online, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu.
News & events
About me
Growing up in Minneapolis, I began learning Mandarin at age 13. This marked the start of a life-long interest in China: as a high school junior, I studied in Beijing in the inaugural School Year Abroad-China program, majored in Asian studies and political science at St. Olaf College, and taught English in Shanghai.
Upon returning to the US, I was on staff at the Wilson Center—a non-partisan think tank in Washington, DC—where I planned programs, researched, and wrote on Asian politics, environmental protection, and NGO development in China; I was also managing editor of its China Environment Series.
I then did doctoral studies in political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. My mixed-methods, year-long field research in China was supported by an interdisciplinary grant from the National Science Foundation. After receiving my PhD, I held postdoctoral fellowships at University of Louisville’s Center for Asian Democracy and University of Southern California’s US-China Institute.
In 2012, I joined King's College London as lecturer in Chinese politics and moved across the street to LSE a year later. In the Department of Social Policy I continue to draw upon my expertise in Chinese politics while also expanding my research both topically and geographically.
My vision
I believe research should be problem-driven and policy-relevant; but it must be particularly attentive to the needs of those most vulnerable in societies. And that teaching should influence the lives beyond the classroom; but it must be sensitive to the systemic inequalities common in academia and knowledge production more broadly.
This vision guiding my career has been shaped, in part, by some core philosophies of institutions where I’ve worked and studied: the Wilson Center seeks to ‘bridge policymaking and actionable ideas’ drawn from research, analysis, and nonpartisan dialogue; UW-Madison’s ‘Wisconsin Idea’ aims improve the lives of those far outside the university, not just students’ studying within it; and LSE's mission to 'understand the causes of things' focuses on identifying the sources of complex social problems and devising ways to help solve them.
In LSE’s Department of Social Policy, we pursue this goal from an international perspective and believe that no single methodological, theoretical, or disciplinary means of inquiry is the 'correct' one.
Ultimately, as a scholar I work to find what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr would call ‘proximate solutions’ to some of the ‘insoluble problems’ of human and societal wellbeing.