I am  an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego. I am also a nonresident China Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC and a member of the Yale GLC Working Group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation. Prior to joining the Kroc School, I conducted research as a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. I also taught in the Masters of Nonprofit Management Program in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong.. I hold a doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford, where I explored reciprocal engagement between grassroots groups and governmental authorities and during which I carried out extensive fieldwork in rural China. My academic research and teaching is supplemented by seven years of experience with an international foundation conducting an institutional capacity building program for grassroots NGOs in China.  I also carried out a four-year research project on development in ethnic minority regions on behalf of China’s leading government policy think-tank under the State Council.

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In addition to teaching and research, I serve on the boards of international development organizations and consult for nonprofits on a voluntary basis. I also actively work to advance a systematic process of community building in my own neighborhood. I was raised in Macau during the 1980s, and then in Beijing for the next twenty-odd years. I was educated in China's public school system, then international school, before leaving Beijing for NYU, where I completed my undergraduate education. I have lived for brief periods in Central America and the Middle East, but have lived most of my life in China. I am fluent in Mandarin, Spanish and Farsi, speak basic Cantonese, and am currently studying Arabic.