Her research interests include public policy, environmental policy and crisis politics. Her current research focuses on why and how public health crises such as food safety scandals, epidemics and environmental incidents lead to legal change in China, and what the nature of such change is.
Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and a lecturer at Mid Sweden University, where she taught courses on public administration, policy processes, and crisis politics.
Van den Dool has a B.A. in Chinese languages and cultures from Leiden University, the Netherlands; an M.Sc. in environmental science, policy and management from Lund University, Sweden; and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Amsterdam.

Dr. Binbin Li is the Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences at the Environmental Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. She holds a secondary appointment with the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She focuses on the synergy between biodiversity conservation and sustainable development under climate change. Her research covers conservation planning to promote synergetic solutions to climate change mitigation and human health, One Health framework, endangered and endemic species conservation in China such as giant pandas, sustainable infrastructure building in the Belt and Road Initiative and bird collisions in urban environment. She promotes to use of innovative technology, market tools, citizen science, and policies to solve conservation problems and assist sustainable local community development.

Dr. Li has been awarded EC50 by Explorers Club, one of the world’s most inspiring explorers. She serves as the co-chair of IUCN WCPA-protected planet specialist group, and serves on the IUCN Species Survival Commission, World Commission on Protected Areas and the Commission on Prevention of Viral Spillover convened by Lancet and PPATS. She is the editor-in-chief of Integrative Conservation and associate editor of Frontiers of Ecology and Evolution. She also serves on the editorial board of Conservation Biology, Global Ecology and Conservation, Biodiversity Science and National Parks.

Dr. Li is engaged in science communication and nature education. She has been awarded nature photographer of the Year in the Chinese National Geography China Wildlife Image and Video Competition in 2022. She is the founder of the China Anti-bird Collision Action Alliance, the largest citizen science project in China. She is also the board director of SilverLining Conservation Center, which aims to increase the capacity of storytelling for conservation practitioners and to change public behaviors using media instruments.

Dr. Li got her PhD in Environment from Duke University (2017), M.S in Natural Resources and Environment from University of Michigan (2012). and B.S in Life Sciences with a dual degree in Economics from Peking University (2010).

His research interest hinges on the intersections between computation and design. With the rise of smartphones and other internet-connected devices, design choices become increasingly data-driven and dependent on information’s credibility in the construction of the human habitat. Chang’s research focuses on human habitat’s design, environmental impact, and information’s credibility in the big-data age. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include computational social science, digital humanities, and urban informatics.
He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals and at conferences, including on dig data and machine learning in natural science, social science, and the humanities.
Chang has a B.A. in geography from Beijing Normal University, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in environmental studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he served as the 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellow in Chinese studies at Stanford University and the 2018-2019 postdoctoral associate in Asian studies at Yale University.

Chi-Yeung Choi is an applied ecologist with expertise in animal ecology, conservation biology, wetland ecology and environmental management. He studies the relationship between animals and their environment. Current study systems include the ecology of migratory birds, with a focus on their foraging and movement ecology within and between coastal intertidal wetlands. This requires extensive fieldwork in many places ranging from Alaska and East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. The work has led to investigations of diet, habitat use, local movement, population dynamics as well as migration phenology and strategies, often using the latest technology in wildlife tracking and remote sensing. Based on the findings from these studies, long-term habitat quality monitoring, protected area boundary adjustment and integrated natural and artificial management are proposed to improve the habitats for migratory waterbirds. These efforts not only contribute to nature conservation, but also to the restoration of wetland ecosystems on which humans depend.

Choi has published in leading conservation journals including Conservation Letters, Conservation Biology and Biological Conservation. He has served as an editorial board member for Avian Research and Stilt, and an associate editor for Journal of Applied Ecology. He was appointed as a specialist by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China, Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands Conservation Foundation and Zhilan Foundation.

Choi has a B.Sc. (1st class honors) in biological ecology from the University of New South Wales (Australia), an M.Sc. in ecology from Fudan University (China) and a Ph.D. in ecology from Massey University (New Zealand). Before joining Duke Kunshan, he worked at the University of Queensland (postdoctoral research fellow), Deakin University (associate research fellow) and Southern University of Science and Technology (research assistant professor).

His research focus is chemical transport and fate in a multimedia environment. He is especially interested in nutrient retention in soil, groundwater, river and lake by the coupled hydrological and biogeochemical processes. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include environmental science, biogeochemistry, Earth science, and ecology.
He has published articles in prestigious journals and served as UNC representative for the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science. He has also served on proposal review panels for the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is a recipient of Wachovia Environmental Award and Excellence in Refereeing from the American Geophysical Union.
Gu has a B.Sc. in environmental science from Nanjing University, an M.Sc. in environmental science from Sun Yat-sen University and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He served as a postdoc researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he held faculty positions at Appalachian State University and Beijing Normal University.

Claudia’s scientific agenda is centered around identifying what works to helps us lead healthier and more sustainable lives. Her research program focuses on the effectiveness of behavioral interventions to promote healthy and sustainable living – eg. how to best promote energy savings, reduce food waste, increase cancer screening or blood donation. She translates behavioral science into practice to tackle these critical challenges, and to respond to calls for better informed policies. In order to do so, she uses a variety of methodological tools including (1) lab studies testing small-scale psychologically-driven interventions; (2) large field experiments testing how to scale-up behavioral interventions in natural settings; and (3) evidence-based policy evaluation, based on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experiments. Claudia has a BSc degree in Social and Organizational Psychology and a MSc in Economics and Social Policy from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She also holds a MSc in Decision Sciences and a PhD in Social Policy, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has served a postdoctoral researcher to ETH-Zurich in Singapore, and New York University in Abu Dhabi.

Dr. Coraline Goron obtained a double Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the aegis of the Erasmus Mundus GEM program. Before joining DKU, Coraline was a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation at the University of Oxford China Centre. Her research centers on environmental politics with a specific focus on China, both domestically and as an increasingly influential actor in global environmental governance. Her Ph.D. thesis received the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology in May 2018. It traced the transformation of China’s power stem and environmental protection and analyzed their combined outcomes on the implementation of decarbonization policies. It draws on a vast corpus of Chinese-language documentation, as well as interviews with Chinese industry experts and policy stakeholders.

His broad research interests are climate variability, weather extremes, and atmospheric dynamics. The essential motivation for his research is to better understand and predict the behavior of the climate system, which has led to his focus on the variability of the large-scale atmospheric circulation and the related weather extremes. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include environmental science and physics. He has had papers published in leading academic journals including Nature Communications, Journal of Climate, and Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. He is a member of American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. Ma has a B.A. in physics for Peking University and a Ph.D. in climate dynamics from Harvard University. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow.

Eunyu Kim’s principal research interest is understanding how plants cope with environmental stresses to improve crop resilience and develop better crops. She has mainly focused on regulating stress-responsive mechanisms and their potential application in Arabidopsis, rice and hot pepper. These studies were published in high-impact journals and generated numerous international patents. She has obtained three research grants as a principal investigator in South Korea and China. Kim got her Ph.D. at Yonsei University in South Korea. After a short postdoctoral training period, she worked as a research professor at Yonsei University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was a research associate professor at the Center for Excellence of Molecular Plant Sciences (CEMPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai.

His research has three foci: (1) harmful algal blooms (HABs), (2) microbiomics, and (3) molecular systems biology. The HAB research aims to identify the functional genomic repertoire that drive bloom formation, and the interaction between functional repertoire and eutrophic conditions through multi-omics integration. Microbiomics aims to the understand the interactions among different group of microbial taxa in microbiomes of aquatic and soil environments, and the underlies genomic functional mechanisms. His current work centers on cyanobacterial bloom microbiomes and human gut microbiome (for example, gut microbiome transplantation and cancer microbiome). Molecular systems biology focuses on the structural decomposition and metabolic networks and development of integration of multi-omics data; this work will reveal how cellular life operates on a systems scale and provide the essential computational tools for analyzing multi-omics data.
He has authored over 40 research articles, book chapters, and reviews, and has had work published in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics. One database of the common ecophysiology of cyanobacterial blooms has been developed for use in the water-bloom research community (http://47.92.225.177/CGDatabase).
Cao has a B.Sc. in biochemistry from Yantai University and a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology from Fordham University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was an assistant research professor at Arizona State University and completed training in bioinformatics at Northern Illinois University and computational systems biology at the University of Georgia.

His research focuses on the intersection of religion and ecology in China. He has published six books including “China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future” (Columbia, 2017). He is noted worldwide as an expert in Daoism, China’s indigenous religion. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethics and leadership, global China studies, environmental science, U.S. studies, religious studies and philosophy.
Miller has a B.A. (honors) in Chinese studies from Durham University, a B.A. (honors) and M.A. in theological and religious studies from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in religious and theological studies from Boston University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was director of the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Canada.

His research centers on environmental economics, economics of innovation, and international trade. His research has appeared in top academic journals in the fields of environmental and resource economics, agricultural economics and energy economics. Recent projects include economic analysis of climate change, welfare impacts of biofuel policies, and effects of environmental policies on environmental innovation. His current projects on climate change and low-carbon innovation have received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he had held positions as a Chu-Tian junior scholar at the Hubei Provincial Department of Education, an associate professor at Wuhan University’s School of Economics and Management, and a postdoctoral research associate and visiting scholar at Iowa State University. He has also served as the referee for leading journals in environmental economics, such as JEEM, JAERE, ERE. Cui has a B.S. in economics and mathematics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, an M.Sc. in economics from Wuhan University and a Ph.D. in economics from Iowa State University.

Epigenetic regulation involves modifying gene expression without altering the DNA sequence, and these changes can be inherited across cells and/or generations. However, the lethality of epigenetic mutants in animal models has limited research into the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of epigenetic modifications in response to environmental signals. To address the questions, the Lee lab is using Arabidopsis as a model plant, which is tolerant of epigenetic mutations. Lee lab uses various molecular and bioinformatic analysis, including large-scale transcriptome, small RNA seq, DNA methylome, and chromatin modification (ChIP seq) analysis, to investigate the mechanisms underlying epigenetic regulation, which are highly conserved in higher eukaryotes.

His research examines topics in environmental history and the history of science. He is especially interested in climate history and is completing a project on climate change debates in the late 19th-century United States. At Duke Kunshan, his teaching interests include U.S. history, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and geography.
He has published articles in Environment and History, and History of Meteorology.
Giacomelli has a B.A. in history and geography from Middlebury College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was a lecturer in the writing program at New York University Shanghai.

Junjie Zhang is a Professor of Environmental Economics in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Investment at Duke Kunshan University. He founded and directed Duke Kunshan’s Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program. Before that, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He was also a Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. His recent research focuses on empirical issues in energy transition, climate change, and green finance. He has received funding from reputable sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, China National Natural Science Foundation, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the Energy Foundation, the World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He holds a B.S. from the Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

His research focus is at the intersection of environmental management, environmental engineering, and sustainability science. He is especially interested in how we can sustainably transition our approaches to water management (e.g., reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enabling resource recovery, improving water security). His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include water, energy and sustainability.
Lam has a B.Eng. in chemical and environmental engineering (with a minor in liberal studies), an M.Phil. in chemical and biomolecular engineering (energy technology concentration) from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a Ph.D. from the University of Queensland. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Delft University of Technology (2018-20), and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland (2017-18).

Kwang Leong Choy’s research focuses on the development of high performance nanostructured and nanocomposite materials based on superthin/thin/thick films using novel and advanced materials synthesis methods for solar cells, energy storage, optoelectronics, environment, engineering, healthcare and biomedical applications. Her pioneering research on the innovative, eco-friendly and cost effective non-vacuum Chemical Vapour Deposition platform technology has led to patents, technology translation and exploitation by industrial companies as well as recognition awards, including the Kroll Medal & Prize (2020) and Grunfeld Memorial Award and Medal (1999) by The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IoM3). She has led and participated in many national, European and international research projects with a large consortium of academia and industries.

She has authored four books, “Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD): Advances, Technology and Applications” (CRC Press, 2019), “Biomaterials in Clinical Practice: Advances in Clinical Research and Medical Devices” (Springer, 2017), “Commercialization of Nanotechnologies–A Case Study Approach” (Springer, 2017) and “Innovative and Cost-effective Materials Processing Methods” (Imperial College Press, London 2002). She has over 300 publications to her name, including papers published in leading academic journals such as Progress in Materials Science, Advanced Materials and ACS Nano. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include materials science, materials synthesis and characterization, nanoscale functional materials and courses that connect materials to energy, environmental science and global health sectors.

Choy has a D.Phil. in materials science from the University of Oxford and a D.Sc. in materials from the University of Nottingham. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was the founding director of the Institute for Materials Discovery and professor for materials discovery at University College London (UCL). She was also course director of the postgraduate taught programme (MSc) in advanced materials science at UCL.

She has served as a chairperson in materials and research director of the University Innovation Centre at the University of Nottingham, and as a reader at Imperial College London. Choy also held the Violette and Glasstone Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. She has received teaching awards from the University of Nottingham and University College London. She has been awarded Fellow of The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

Huang has a B.S (2007) in Electrical Engineering at Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, an M.S. (2010) in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. (2014) in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining Duke Kunshan University in 2021, he was an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University (2014-2021). His research focus is the intersection among Active Health, Internet-of-Things, Machine Learning and Informatics, Motion and Physiological Signal Sensing. He had over 15 years of research experience conducting interdisciplinary scientific projects with researchers from distinct areas (e.g., Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, and Nursing). He had successfully administered past funded projects and productively published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, 6 invention patents and software copyrights, and won 7 best paper awards/runner-up. His research has been reported in hundreds of high-impact media outlets. For the nature of richness and high impact of the research topics he was involved in, his research results in a plethora of new knowledge in aspects ranging from innovative IoT sensing technology, closed-loop AI analytics methodology, optimized clinical decision-making, and just-in-time patient risk assessment. Current Research Interests From Digital Factory to Digital Health: Digital Twin Platform Construction for Brain Science Research (PI: Huang) Critical Techniques for Personalized and Precise Medicine: Devices, Systems, and Big Data Analytics Platforms (PI: Huang) Early Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease Powered by Data Harnessing, AI, and Transfer Learning (PI: Huang) Development and Pilot Testing of a Just-in-Time Mobile Smoking Cessation Intervention for Persons Living with HIV (MPI: Huang, Schnall)

His current research is at the interface of critical theory, Latin American studies and anthropology. His work explores political memory and the symbolic bases of citizenship, democracy and dictatorship in Latin America. He has also done long-term fieldwork in lowland Amazonia focusing on indigenous notions of mind, knowledge, and health. At Duke Kunshan, his teaching interests span medical and political anthropology, Latin American cultures and politics, migration and citizenship studies, and critical theory. Rodd has edited two special journal issues – International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society and Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research – and published book chapters in English, Spanish and French. His articles has appeared in anthropology and politics journals including Critique of Anthropology, Anthropology of Consciousness, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Journal of Latin American Religion, Democratic Theory, and Citizenship Studies. He served as the secretary of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA) from 2016 to 2020, and has twice co-convened the Australian Anthropological Society annual conference. Rodd has a B.A. (Hons) in history from the University of Western Australia, a B.A. in Spanish from Edith Cowan University, and a Ph.D. with distinction in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Western Australia. Before joining Duke Kunshan, Rodd taught anthropology at James Cook University, Australia.

His research focus is the intersection of polymer, colloid, and nanoscience. He is especially interested in sustainable low-carbon solutions for industry, including but not limited to energy-saving catalysts, recyclable materials, plastic waste upcycling, and bio-based degradable materials. He is also interested in developing high-performance flexible electronics. He has had papers published in leading academic journals including Annual Review of Materials Research, Nanoscale, Carbon, ChemSusChem, Journal of Physical Chemistry.

His teaching interest at Duke Kunshan University includes polymer science, material science, and fundamental chemistry.

Tan has a B.Eng. in polymer material and an M.Eng. in material processing from Sichuan University. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Oklahoma State University and completed his postdoctoral training at Texas A&M University. Before joining Duke Kunshan University, he was a research scientist at Texas A&M University and University of Delaware.

Her research focus is the bio-inspired materials with advanced functions and performance. She is especially interested in sustainable applications, i.e. water harvesting, synthetic trees, special wettability. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include bio-inspired smart materials, analytic chemistry, and inorganic chemistry.

She has had papers published in leading academic journals including ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Advanced Materials Interfaces, Advanced Materials, and ACS Nano. Her research has attracted much attention, from CNN, Boston Globe, Washington Post, etc., and was highlighted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Oak Ridge National Lab. Her invention was a finalist in the U.S. Collegiate Inventors Competition and was fully patented. In addition, she is a topic editor for Micromachines and a peer reviewer for the Journal of Vibroengineering, Journal of Measurements in Engineering, Journal of Thermal Science and Engineering Applications, Micromachines, Materials, Sustainability, and other journals.

Shi has a B.Sc. and an M.Eng. in applied chemistry from Beihang University, Beijing, and a Ph.D. in engineering mechanics from Virginia Tech.

His research focus is in plant physiological and ecological responses to environmental change. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include integrated science, biology and environmental science, especially lifecycle analysis and systems thinking.
He has directed environmental science research centers and academic programs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Oregon State University and North Carolina State University. He also worked in research administration at the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Winner has B.A. and M.A. teaching degrees in biology from the Lewis and Clark College, Portland, an M.A. in biology from the University of South Dakota, and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Calgary, Canada.

He’s research explores the interactions between human behaviors, government policy and the environment in the context of developing countries, with special interests in land use, conservation, natural resource management and rural development. Trained as an economist with a strong interdisciplinary background, he is particularly interested in incorporating economic thinking with non-economic methodology. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan University include environmental and resource economics, environmental policy analysis and the statistics of program evaluation.

He has a B.A. in environmental studies from Brown University, an M.A. in economics from New York University and a Ph.D. in environmental policy from Duke University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was assistant professor at Wuhan University.

His primary research interests are in regional and urban economics. His current research focuses on a wide range of topics in applied economics, such as policy evaluation and the impacts of population aging on local labor markets. Zhang has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Shandong University, an M.Sc. in population, resource and environmental economics from Fudan University and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He has also obtained a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Demography. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he had taught a wide range of undergraduate courses, including on principles of economics, microeconomics, and population and development.

Xinrong’s research centers at the interface of polymer synthetic chemistry and electrochemical energy storage, where she dedicates herself to seeking creative solutions in response to the challenges in new energy economy and future technological revolution. Her research group has developed next-generation energy storage systems including all-solid-state batteries/ supercapacitors, facilitated by in-house established synthetic tools to access electrochemically active organic energy materials including fluorinated polymers, polysiloxanes, conducting polymers, covalent organic frameworks, ionic liquids and eutectic electrolytes. Her group is also working on developing data automation and high-throughput methods in battery materials discovery, analysis and production. She has had papers published in leading academic journals including Chem, Adv. Funct. Mater., ACS Energy Lett., J. Am. Chem. Soc., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Chem. Sci, Chem. Soc. Rev., etc. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include organic chemistry, polymer materials, electrochemical energy storage. She has been active in guiding students to use in-class knowledge to solve cutting-edge energy problems in real life, which has led to her leading teams of undergraduates winning national prizes in college competitions. Xinrong received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Boston University where she worked on the synthesis and characterization of macromolecules and understanding their structure-property relationships. Her Ph. D training was also received from MIT, where she expanded her research expertise to the interface of  polymer science and energy storage. Prior to joining DKU, she worked as a research team leader at BASF-global battery materials to develop battery materials for electric vehicles, associate professor at Yunnan University, and a postdoctoral associate at Boston University.

Yang’s research applies behavioral decision science to characterizing and communicating scientific results to inform risk-related decisions. More recently, she has been working on risk communication to better inform public health decisions, while her previous research focused on risk communication on advanced energy technologies. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include health communication and decision making.

She received her Ph.D. degree (2017-21) from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also served as a postdoctoral research associate (2022). She received her M.S. in nuclear engineering and B.A. in English literature and journalism from Tsinghua University.

Dr. Zhang is an interdisciplinary geospatial scientist with expertise in spatial data science and digital city tools. Her research centers on urban sustainability, climate change adaptation, and public health. She particularly focuses on the impacts of urban 3D morphology and canopy changes on climate-smart and resilient urban planning, and health impact assessments to improve environmental justice and urban greening efforts. At Duke Kunshan, her teaching interests encompass applied environmental science and policy, data analytics, and geographical information science. She has been honored with the Gilbert F. White Environment and Society Fellowship and her work has been published in top-ranking journals including “Landscape and Urban Planning,” “Environmental Research Letters,” and “Landscape Ecology.” Dr. Zhang holds an M.S. in GIS for Development and Environment from Clark University and a Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside, and served as a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, Ohio.

His expertise lies in Chinese economic and business history; the global history of capitalism, technology, and industry; quantitative data analysis; and digital humanities. His book project, “Engineering Modern China: Industrial Factories and the Transformation of the Chinese Economy in the Long Twentieth Century,” was the first to analyze the remarkable creation of the Chinese factory economy from the late Qing to post-Mao era.
He is the founder of the Chinese Factory Project, a digital humanities initiative that collects and publicizes archival materials and quantitative datasets on China’s industrial development, technological change, and resource utilization. He is also working on two new book projects: one on Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations in the 1980s, and another on a global history of China’s economic and social transitions in the reform era.
His work has appeared in high-impact academic journals such as World Development, Pacific Affairs, and Entreprises et Histoire, and his research has received funding from Harvard University, Harvard Business School, the D. Kim Foundation for Science and Technology, the Association for Asian Studies, and Business History Conference, among others.
Zeng has M.Phil. in social science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, Austin. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was visiting assistant professor of East Asian History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Zuchuan’s research focus lies at the intersection of data science, statistics, machine learning and environmental science. His research has been published in leading academic journals including Nature, Nature Communications and Global Biogeochemical Cycles. He has been awarded the NASA Earth and space science fellowship and the WHOI postdoctoral scholarship. His teaching interests include data science, statistics, machine learning and environmental science. He has a B.Sc. from Wuhan University and a Ph.D. from Duke University.